Sometimes, I become aware of how vast this Journey is, how decisions and options have dictated the paths of my Life, accidentally or on purpose. I know that each choice made in the moment has affected the next choice made in the next moment, whether it is taking a breath or a step, or looking somewhere for a split second and going in that direction. It baffles me that I am mostly unaware of those intuitive choices but that they affect everything that happens to me. On stage there are set parameters (movement, dialogue, story line, character) within which one is pretty well confined, and “being in the moment” gives only an impression of spontaneity. I’ve resolved, at times, to become more aware of “being in the moment” in daily life, but the complexity of each decision or the choices within those moments are not at all like being on stage.

That being said, it was at this point in my career that I became overwhelmed by the immensity and variety of those choices. It is only from this perspective, so many years later, that I marvel at the choices I made back then. I find the “what if” factor playing out in my mind. “What if” I had stayed working my way up the management ladder at Lincoln Center in New York? Would I have reached the top and be running the place now? What if I’d never moved to Winnipeg? It’s a fun game to play but irrelevant. But there were a lot of moments when I applied those “what if” questions to choices BEFORE I made them. With no secure footing ahead of me, I took time to figure out what to do. Should I stay in Winnipeg? Was there enough work to sustain me practically and artistically? I needn’t have worried. Word began to circulate that I was “at liberty” and, fortunately, offers began to flow from a variety of sources.

UNfortunately, the initial offers were not the ones I wanted.

First out of the gate was the Director with whom I’d done the “Pinafore” tour. He wanted me to come to Alberta to do a school tour of “Don Pasquale”! “Don Pasquale”?? As a school tour?? The subject matter is rather adult and cutting it down made no sense at all. So I passed on that. He came back again a short while later with another school tour in Alberta, this time of “Pirates of Penzance”! Once more, no thanks. Then, amazingly, AGAIN, with a remounting of “Pinafore” on yet another school tour, again for Manitoba Opera! Would no one rid me of this troublesome director?? On the surface, the choices were relatively easy, but it was very hard turning down work like that! It wasn’t the last time I was to hear from him.

Then, everything happened at once!

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra was in touch next to book a good number of Kids Concerts for me to host and narrate. I loved doing that kind of work. With a program set, I was given free creative rein and control of the information and how it was to be presented to the young people. It was a teaching experience and I had great fun pointing out what to listen for in the great music the orchestra then proceeded to play.  Sometimes, I was just being myself, but sometimes (most fun of all!) I took on a character, like being Johannes Brahms in the “Mr. Brahms Is In The Building” concert, mixing interesting “personal” anecdotes and a lot of humour. When one gets Symphony Musicians and Maestro (Bramwell Tovey) to laugh out loud during performance, you know your material is working!

MTC wanted me to play piano and sing at opening night parties for the season. That was back in the day when I had kept up my piano skills and felt confident faking my way through standards and show tunes – just as long as folks were chattering away and not paying too much attention to me. It was just a slightly formalized extension of what we used to do in MTC’s Upper Bar almost every night after shows during the Company Seasons, except now I was getting paid to do it! Great fun!

Manitoba Theatre For Young People (“MTYP”) booked me for a new adaptation of “The Little Prince” being penned by Robbie Paterson, but more on that later.

Allied Arts Theatre School asked me to teach some evening Acting and Improv Classes. My teaching experience during all those Portland years would now come in handy. Approaching the craft of Acting came very easily, but, if truth be known, I’m not very into Improv. In fact, I don’t like it at all … probably because I’m so miserable at it.  Oddly, I can tell when it’s working and when it isn’t. The unfortunate thing about Improv (at least for me) is that the focus always seems to be on getting one’s audience to laugh. I guess that’s okay purely as entertainment; after all, who wants to spend an evening sitting through an improv about someone contemplating suicide? But practically speaking, what’s the point? (I was to learn later that there were some powerful practical applications for improvisational exchanges.) I’ve been known to walk out of a rehearsal when the director announces “let’s do an improv on this scene”! “Where are you going?” is usually the question as I get up to leave the room. “I think I’ll take some time to learn the lines the playwright wants me to say” is my cocky comeback.  I get shunned by the cast for a while but feel my time has been much better spent on the script rather than trying to make up things to say that have already been said much better by the writer. (And while I’m venting, I also have great trouble with what is called “table work”! This is time spent sitting with the cast and director at a large table dissecting the play and characters for hours and hours on end!  Discussions go on endlessly, cerebrally, pretentiously, and all can think of is the time being better spent “on one’s feet” doing the play and asking  relevant questions as we go along. For me, I get much more information and make more discoveries from “doing the play” than from merely talking about it.)  But back to Improv.

I remember being persuaded by a friend one evening to attend a performance of a local Improv Group. They were well-established, young, avid and irreverent, but just slightly out of the acting community mainstream although I had worked with some of them before. They had a huge following, mostly University students. The house was packed but we found a couple of seats dead center about five rows from the stage. The “games” that comprised the evening began well enough. I found some of it amusing, some of it silly, but their energies were always aimed at making the audience laugh, which they did, long and hard at times. I started to get a bit bored as it all started to seem the same after a while.

Well into the evening, one particular game had to do with a member of the troupe going offstage and the remaining folks asking the audience for a subject to have the offstage person guess. The subject (and I remember this so distinctly) was “two eggs in a frying pan”. The member returned to the stage and there ensued an innocuous, meandering back-and-forth banter that I had trouble following but which went on for a long time. Finally they stopped and the guesser said “two eggs in a frying pan”. What!! WHAT?? My hands went up in disbelief! It was as if water had been turned into wine before my very eyes, as if someone had levitated into the middle of the air before me. I could feel my eyes widen as I frantically thought through the exchange trying to understand how he had guessed the subject. The audience started to applaud and I turned to my friend, profoundly baffled and confused, and said loudly, to overcome the noise of the clapping, “HOW DID HE KNOW THAT??!!”

As I started to speak, the applause stopped. It didn’t peter out. It just stopped. And my question rang out through the now silent room. This provoked a huge laugh from the audience and, like a mob of meerkats hearing a noise out on the veldt, the Troupe, as one, snapped their heads in my direction. Oh, Lord! The leader of the group started slowly walking to the edge of the stage, shielding his eyes from the stage lighting looking for … well … me. “Who said that?” I could feel all heads and eyes in the theatre turn in my direction. He looked right at my face, bent forward and, squinting a bit more, said “Oh my God, is that Richard Hurst?!” With great delight his fellow meerkats proceeded to fall over each other as they scrambled down to the edge of the stage. I tried to make myself invisible, sinking as far into my seat as I could. For the next five minutes I was the helpless target of their skills. I was schooled in the finer points of their craft and how it worked and made the brunt of their sly but good-natured humour. The audience loved it! Me? Not so much. I’ve not been to Improv performance since.

I’ll tell you a story about one of my own experiences doing Improv in a moment.

Stage West (where I’d done “How The Other Half Loves”) hired me to do some temp work in their office typing up memos, doing some payroll and answering the phone. This was a great job because I could keep my ear to the ground about the town gossip (and there was a LOT of it) from a Management point of view and what shows the Company was considering and how I might fit in. Another great bonus was getting free food from the theatre’s kitchen on Matinee Wednesdays! The choices of productions for down-the-road changed almost daily. At one point I was being considered to play opposite Sandy Dennis in “Two For The Seesaw”. But that didn’t come to pass. The Stage West office was where I learned how to use a Dictaphone, stop-start pedals and all, a skill which I’ve never had occasion to use again … thankfully!

Prairie Theatre Exchange wanted me for a production of “After Baba’s Funeral” and this is where it started to get complicated because of conflicting dates with other gigs that were also in play. Pitting one engager against another was perilous but, thankfully it all worked out for the most part. I hated turning down the innovative and adventurous Kim McCaw, PTE’s Artistic Director, because of scheduling, but we would work together a number of times down the road.

It was about this time that word began to circulate about the tenuous hold the new AD had on the reins at MTC. Staff was not happy as conditions began to deteriorate and the atmosphere became morose. He had even asked people to sign “loyalty oaths” which prohibited them from working at or involving themselves with other theatres or projects in town. That did not go over well. Production and Marketing people in particular were affected. One could sense the tension just walking into the building – which I had to do on occasion to pick up mail. Everyone seemed to be hanging on by threads and there were some departures of folks who had been there for years. This was certainly a situation to watch in the time ahead.

Aside from all the offers, I found myself creating more personal chaos by initiating some projects of my own. With Larry Weckwerth, Music Director at my church, we had designed a wonderful Concert Series called “Music At Augustine”. As part of that series, I had put together a Vocal Recital called “The English Tradition”. Creating a program of music I’d sung over the years was challenging and fulfilling at the same time, and with a deadline of a late Fall presentation, managing the series and performing in it took up some more “free” time. Additionally, commercial voice-overs continued to take up a LOT of time as did taking and printing head shots for actors in town.

And then there was The Police Academy.

The Academy (housed in a former elementary school) was the training component of the Winnipeg Police Department. It taught embryonic police officers all the skills required to become fully fledged guardians of the public. It taught them about firearms and ballistics, maintaining law and order on the streets, keeping a good shine on their shoes and how to perfect the wonderful swagger that came with the very heavy gun belt around the waist (I was to discover years later how heavy it really was and how it actually does affect the way one walks while wearing it). It also taught them public relations, how to deal with people in all kinds of situations. Some of those situations were domestic disturbances or “a domestic”, where people in their own homes were causing trouble requiring police intervention.

There was only one way to duplicate those situations. That was with … you guessed it … ACTORS! A number of seasoned performers in town were hired once a year for these intense sessions to portray individuals in conflict in a home environment. I only took part in one session. Not being all that great at improvising, I worried that I wasn’t going to come up with the “right” thing to say, but some friends who were old hands at doing this told me it was “a piece of cake”. I also worried that I wasn’t going to make it real enough for these young trainees to get a true impression of what it might be like in the outside world.

As I quickly discovered, the baby cops were more nervous that I was. In fact, they were “sweating bullets”, no pun intended. The actors had been given a loose outline of an actual documented disturbance from the past, but the officers had no idea what they would encounter as they entered our “house”. We were to start improvising the conflict and, at a signal, the trainees would knock and enter. The “incident” (as the officers called these events) was being taped but also watched live in another room by both the trainers and other actors waiting for their “incident”. The pressure was high for everyone.

The first scene between me and Pat Hunter, a good friend who was playing my wife, concerned a husband who had been taking money from this wife’s purse. She had called the cops to have me put out of the house. The signal came and we launched into it. We began yelling at each other and once we had reached the hammer and tongs stage, the police knocked at the door, entered, and we were off to the races. There were a couple of interesting mental observations I made as all this was happening. On one hand, we were taking this very seriously merely by listening to each other and creating the reality with what we were screaming at each other. That was the “in the moment” awareness, particularly for the cops. We were being ourselves and not playing “characters”. On the other hand, I was also aware that this wasn’t real. The cops were not going to arrest me, but they had to believe what they were hearing and seeing and deal with these out-of-control people. The technique used in every situation was to separate and diffuse. It always worked – or at least we LET it work! Once the combatants are away from each other, there is no way for the conflict to continue. The officer I had to deal with was a young lady who spoke very quietly. Patty had a huge hulk of a man towering over her. There was never any sense of intimidation or aggressiveness by the officers, but rather an effort to calm us both down and then to mediate. Even though the exercise went on for only twenty minutes, I think we succumbed to their technique a bit too easily.

Afterward, Pat, who had done this many times before, told me that I was too much of a “teddy bear”, that I wasn’t angry enough and didn’t create enough of a threat. There was too much of the poet in me. Thinking back to my somewhat flowery diatribe about “compassion” and “our marriage vows to love, honour and obey”, I guess she was right. We laughed about for a long time afterward.

There were a few more “incidents” and they became easier the more I did. We even had some breaks where we would watch other scenes on the closed circuit TV in another room. Some officers who had completed their exercise watched with us and it was very interesting to learn what had been going through their minds as they were experiencing the conflict. Not one of them thought it wasn’t real! Talk about suspension of disbelief!

In my final incident I was paired with an actor I’d worked with a few times before. He was tall and thin, very fastidious in the way he dressed and rather elegant in demeanor. In the scenario, we were friends who had bet each other fifty dollars on the outcome of a hockey game. My team had won but he’d refused to pay and wanted me out of his house. I refused to leave until he had given me the money and he had called the police. By now, I was feeling very much at ease with how to escalate the exchanges that preceded the arrival of the police.

We started the scene and I was suddenly faced with … Jed Clampett!!! Somehow we were now in the depths of the Ozarks! My scene partner was talking in a reedy voice with a drawl so thick I could barely understand what he was saying. I was in an episode of “The Andy Griffiths Show”!! He was yelling at me as the knock on the door came. In walked two hulking policemen. I mean they were HUGE! I thought of asking if we could stop for a moment to get back to some kind of reality for these guys but it was too late. So, on we went, me trying to keep my wits about me and my partner screaming at me in a Southern twang at the top of his lungs! The cops stepped between us and, by their sheer physical presence (they weren’t allowed to touch us) and repeating “Sir, Sir” over and over again, got us apart and into chairs on opposite sides of the room. Despite their size, I could see their hands shaking. They managed to calm us down a bit but, in order to continue the challenge for the officers, we would launch into the argument a few more times. There were points, despite my partner’s “character”, when it actually felt real, as if nothing else existed for those few moments and, to tell the truth, that was a great feeling. Eventually the tension was diffused through the calm of the cops and, having come to an impasse, the scene ended with my exit, yelling that I would “see you in court!”

Afterward I asked my partner what the hell he thought he was doing with the accent and all. “Just mixing it up a bit” he said. Actors!!!

I did only one of those sessions but have never forgotten it. The difference between these scenes and doing an improv in a rehearsal situation was that, other than the loosest of contexts, there were no limitations. There was no proscribed end-game, no real resolution. We used our own words and our own voices (for the most part), we weren’t playing characters (for the most part) and were told when to stop based only on the assessment of the officer’s performances by the trainers. I mentioned before that I could find no practical uses for improv. I discovered that these training sessions were one use – and an important one at that. There are medical drills, firefighter drills, disaster aftermath drills, where real people were put into fabricated dire situations and told to react in order to test a response unit’s reaction and readiness. That works for me.

I have a friend here in Victoria who constantly asks me to come and see her Improv group perform. I have managed to avoid attending for a while now. Perhaps remembering these experiences from long ago might give me a different perspective.

I said “might”

The four seasons at MTC had set the bar very high in a number of areas. Production (sets, props, costumes, etc.) and Stage Management had always been superb. One never worried about the quality of the environment in which we were to present ourselves. The performers were astonishing in their abilities and commitment to each project and, most importantly (at least to me) to each other. But one crucial element of putting the shows together stood above all the others. That was the Directors! Richard (Ouzounian) had directed many of the productions himself but he also brought in massively experienced directors from around North America and beyond who were experts in certain styles and approaches. They “knew their shit” in no uncertain terms and their insight and vision established a standard by which, even today, I judge all others.

After returning from Ottawa, I was immediately hired by the Manitoba Opera for a touring production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” playing ‘Sir Joseph Porter’. This was a touring “Theatre For Young Audiences” production, a Contract that Actors’ Equity had established a number of years earlier to allow schools and Community Organizations to experience professional performances usually in areas away from the larger centers. There were more cons than pros to this Contract. One “pro” of course was the length of these engagements – working for extended periods of time was good! The “cons” made themselves very apparent in the low fee scale set by the Union, the number of performances allowed in a week and the conditions in which we were permitted to work. Oh! My! God!

I must preface my accounting of much of what follows by saying that I face a conundrum in “how” to write about these experiences. I’m not normally one to be mean-spirited or nasty to or about another human being. At least I try not to be. I recently saw a quote saying that if someone is having a negative impact on you there are two approaches; one, get that person out of your life or two, call that person out. I have chosen to do neither. Any negative references to people (and there are a number of them) in the pages ahead will leave out the person’s name, although a bit of research would make identification relatively easy. They will not escape my reactions at this point in time to their behaviour or actions “back then”!

In approaching the TFYA engagement, I had no idea what to expect. Of course I was happy for the work but somewhat apprehensive based on horror stories I’d heard from others who had been through such tours. I was fortunate to be working with some wonderful people, particularly Tracy Dahl and Richard Margison, also neophytes to the contract and both very early in their now-spectacular international operatic careers. Our struggles began mounting rather quickly. This production of “Pinafore” had a company of 8 (!) artists (not all professionals) and once on the road was to be augmented by community or student on-stage involvement. While well-intentioned, our “Director” (who had been a Stage Manager in Opera for a number of years and now decided he wanted to “move up” in this genre) was, to put it mildly, ill-equipped in every way to mount this production. That became apparent very quickly during our rehearsal period as he demonstrated his basic inability to stage a scene! He had no awareness of the character relationships, the flow of the story (as demonstrated by his brutal editing of the script) and, in purely practical terms, no idea how to talk to artists as human beings in order to achieve results!

I was the senior (read “oldest”) artist in the group with a fair amount of on-stage experience. After each small stage direction to one of the other players he would look over at me for approval of what he’d done. This was maddening! Catching on to what he was doing, I would turn away following a bit of staging refusing to meet his eyes. At the same time, I began feeling sorry for him because he was so obviously out of his depth and pretty much at sea as to how to put it all together. As a result, we would stand around for hours on end as he tried to figure out how to make it work. Remember that I had been dealing with Broadway and International directors for the four years previous. I tried to be patient but as time went on, we all started to get very frustrated. The result were inevitable “we vs. him” stand-offs which, as Deputy, I had to mediate any number of times if only to get us through the rehearsal process. Add to this already tense situation, a tiny ancient woman named Bereth Berse from the Ladies Opera Guild would arrive from time to time, unannounced and uninvited, and, as a self-appointed guardian of the English Language, would sit and yell at us about our diction and volume! But we weathered it, coming out the other side not a little the worse for wear. It was a great relief to escape into the tour.

Initially, ensconced in our rental van, we were a merry little band (“merry” because we were away from the clutches of our theatrical persecutor) as we headed out into rural Manitoba. Our Director had savagely cut the normally two-and-a-half hour production down to one hour for the day time School Performances (and ninety-minutes for the evening Community Shows). That left us grasping to make clear the traditionally convoluted G&S story line and character relationships for our audiences! The young kids in the schools couldn’t have cared less. This was time out of the classroom! Watching adults spouting unintelligible language and singing and dancing in weird costumes was little more than baffling to them and twenty minutes was usually the far end of their attention span. For us, it was HELL!

One of our collective duties was to unload and set up the “scenery” before the show. Another was to then do a short rehearsal with the kids who had been selected to play the Sailor Chorus in some of the numbers. They didn’t have to sing but just stand there, listen and react as we guided them about the stage into various formations. It was like herding cats! Of course everything we had rehearsed with them had completely evaporated by the time they were herded onto the stage and we invariably had to improvise everything. Forcing a dozen seven and eight year olds to move to various places on a tiny stage or the gym floor while singing “When I Was A Lad” was exhausting to say the least. Doing it ten times a week month after month was downright debilitating!! But, as is always the case in the Theatre, we got through it.

It was a luxury of sorts when we had evening Community shows with Adults in the house AND helping us as our Chorus. Some of the groups had even prepared the musical responses to “When I Was A Lad” and joined in at the appropriate places during the song which made us all very happy. But, as time went on spending every hour of every day together, tiny tensions arose among us. Little frays began to show. Folks took to making little “improvements” to their parts, mugging shamelessly for laughs, changing blocking and responses to lines and not caring a whit how if affected the rest of us. Gentle reminders from our poor Stage Manager to stick to the script bore little fruit and toward the end of our run, we descended into a contentious little group. Fortunately, by that point, we were into run-outs which meant that we spent nights at our own homes and drove to the venues only short distances from the city.  The weekends were also small reprieves from our challenges and we could get away from each other and back into “real life”. The production sputtered somewhat ungracefully to an end and I vowed I would never again be put into another situation like that. Needless to say it was a vow I couldn’t keep!

Without the regularity of Company paychecks in my life, scrambling for work became a high priority. Even while on Tour, I was networking, letter writing, making phone calls, just trying to stay connected and keeping my ear to the ground for things to do. I had maintained my interest in photography and managed to build a small reputation by taking headshots for actors around town. That was somewhat lucrative. My connection with the Augustine United Church Choir was on-going and very involving. I was a paid soloist there and rehearsals and services served to keep my voice in good shape. Along with all this was a very active commercial voice-over career. I got calls constantly and hardly a week went by that I wasn’t standing in a studio doing ads for some local or National business. My most ardent employer became Travel Manitoba, the government agency overseeing Tourism in the Province! I guess I had the sound they wanted for their annual campaigns (usually about 40 commercials) and that went on for a number of years. I became known as “the Voice of Manitoba”! There was one year when they hadn’t called me for the campaign so I had gone ahead and scheduled and paid for an extended trip to England. When they finally did call only to discover that I was going to be away during the time period they needed me, they went nuts. They ended up paying all the hotel, air and excursion cancellation expenses and penalties just to keep me in town. Nice to be wanted! And it all certainly kept my head well above water financially for a very long time.

Jack Shapira was a titan in the local music and theatre business! By the time I met him, he had been going strong for years with his Orchestra, on CBC with “The Show That Jack Built” and, since 1966, as Producer and General Manager of Rainbow Stage. Rainbow had been in bad shape when he swooped in to reorganize and revitalize the Company. There was no doubt about his single-minded devotion to the performing arts in the city. And, for a time – a long time, in fact – he held sway during the summer months producing Musicals at the Stage in Kildonan Park and bringing in thousands of people to Canada’s major outdoor Theatre. My first involvement with Rainbow was as ‘Perchik’ in “Fiddler On The Roof”. Having just come out of Gilbert and Sullivan with a cast of 8 I was jolted into “the big time”, now surrounded by a cast of 50 actors, singers and dancers, all well-heeled and raring to get this big show on stage.

Jack was enigmatic to me. He took me under his wing for a time because I was usually amenable and always forthright, something he respected greatly. He admired my spunk and focus and honesty. Hardly a day would go by that he didn’t call me to gossip (which he loved to do) or commiserate or to rant about having to pay Equity actors “so much money”, as if the salaries were being taken out of his own pocket and not the Company’s. He would threaten to make the theatre non-professional and save lots of money. Those parts of our conversations always made me nervous but I would just cajole him and eventually calm him down. But at the heart of it was always the fact that, to him, the outside world was taking advantage of him, infringing upon his kingdom and he didn’t like it one bit. Little did anyone know then that this dark aspect of his personality would lead to a series of events that would send shock waves through the industry some years later.

The production values were adequate based on the somewhat primitive environment in which they were created. This was back in the day before the physical stage facility had been expanded and modernized to the state it is in today (Old and new Rainbow photos at left). Back then there was no major stage housing, the audience sat outside (although a huge dome was eventually added in 1970), and there was no fly gallery or adequate back stage space. Sets and scenery were tracked on from the wings and nothing was “flown”. The roof leaked, sometimes massively, depending on the size of the storm, and the orchestra pit would flood regularly. Dressing rooms were cramped, damp and dumpy. But there was a sense of “putting on the show” against all odds … and there were a lot of them. Raccoons, mosquitoes, heat and humidity (remember, this was all outdoors) and a sound system that left a great deal to be desired!

In the time ahead, I’ll touch a lot on Rainbow (I did 31 shows there as a performer and Director over the years to come) but this first experience was bliss. It reminded me of the old summer stock days in Nova Scotia and of being a part of something unique. This “Fiddler” was directed by the fiery Tibor Fehergyhazi, a passionate, confrontational and thoroughly experienced crazed Hungarian refugee who had seen life from all sides of its challenges. He would guide by provocation, encouragement and mad harangues but always lifted a production above and beyond the norms and I loved working for him. The rehearsals were always in the MTC Rehearsal Hall and then we would move to “The Stage” (and the heat and mosquitoes) for the final rehearsal stages. In “Fiddler”, ‘Perchik’ is the young revolutionary who turns up in Anatevka and eventually takes away ‘Hodel”, Tevye’s daughter (in this case, the wonderful Andorlie Hillstrom), thus beginning the spiral of dissolution. It’s a beautiful role with some beautiful music to sing and I loved playing the part. Local Legend Cliff Gardiner was playing ‘Tevye’, a part he had played a number of times before. He had the role down to a tee and was marvelous to watch and to act with on so many levels (below is a photo of Cliff and Evie Anderson in the Wedding scene; you can see my head just to the right there!)! Winnipeg audiences LOVED “Fiddler”. The large local Jewish population guaranteed full houses every night and the show has always been a money-maker for Rainbow.

The production ran smoothly until one night in mid-run. During the “Sabbath Prayer” scene, there were some wonky notes coming from the pit. It sounded as though a clarinet player had a broken reed. We thought nothing of it. The scene continued until we became aware of loud talking coming from someplace other than the stage. The voice got louder and louder and we realized it was coming from the PIT!! As time went on we found ourselves competing with another scene going on just a few feet away below us. The voice began yelling incoherently … “We’ve been waiting all our lives for this” and other things that didn’t make any sense. Our focus was quickly ebbing as we tried to maintain what was supposed to be happening on stage, but lines were being lost and Cliff was becoming more and more distracted. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Bob McMullin, our mild-mannered conductor, walk from his podium over into the Woodwind section. I had thought that, somehow, a drunken member of the audience had managed to wander into the pit and was causing all the commotion which, by now, was getting completely disruptive. My exit from the scene approached and ran off to one of the stage managers frantically whispering “What the hell is going on!?” From their position way back in the wings they could see none of what was happening but when I pointed out the mayhem it became quite obvious that something was very wrong.

Usually, Nick Rice, who was playing Motel, the tailor, and I had a small in-character exchange in the wings just before his entrance to make him aware of the action in the story on stage. We were very serious about maintaining our own suspensions of disbelief at every quarter. I tried to incorporate a little of what he might “discover” once he went on stage but the coin didn’t drop for him and he toddled out to Tevye’s house to ask for his daughter’s hand. I ran back to the dressing room to tell the guys what was going on and as I got there, we heard the sound of swelling applause over the Tannoy, growing and growing to ovation proportions. We dashed out into the wings just in time to see one of our stage hands, the massive, hulking ‘Big Burt”, lying on his stomach on the runway surrounding the pit, reaching down, grabbing a middle-aged clarinet player under his arms and, with a huge effort, hoisting him out of the pit! The audience was going crazy as Cliff, Nick and Rhona, who was playing ‘Tzeitl’, stood frozen, transfixed by the insanity playing out right in front of them. The audience was now standing up and “ovating” for all they were worth! The extraction was followed by three more stagehands scrambling up onto the runway and pushing the musician forcibly off-stage and it was over!

As it turned out, the clarinetist had arrived at the theatre inebriated and during the first Act our Conductor had told him to stop playing because he was hitting so many wrong notes. Apparently there had been a rivalry and tensions between the two of them for years and it all came to a head on this particular night. At intermission, the Police were called, Shapira arrived to calm things down, and the show went on with all the clarinets moving up one to fill in the missing chair. This episode had taken a full ten minutes to play out (an eternity on-stage) and is indelibly imprinted on the memories of all who witnessed it. Ah, a Life in the Thea-tuh!!

During the Spring and Summer that year, the entire theatre community in Winnipeg awaited, with bated breath, the announcement of next Artistic Director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre. What would this person be like? Would we know who he or she was? And, most importantly, what opportunities would be available for the performing community in the new playbill? This all became abundantly clear very quickly with a press release to which one could hear our collective voices rise up asking “Who?”

Rarely one to let the grass grow under my feet, I let the dust settle a bit and quickly made arrangements for a welcoming interview and to let him (yes, “him”) know that I was at his disposal. I arrived at the appointed time and Joanne, Richard’s secretary and a good friend, indicated that I could go in. It struck me that she seemed slightly tentative, which was unusual for her, and rather distant. I stepped up to the open door of the AD’s office and knocked on the door jamb. He was a small, skinny man with uncombed hair and a scruffy beard. “Ah, the artsy type”, I thought. He looked up from what he was doing, paused and said “I have nothing for you”. It took me a moment to actually process the words he had spoken. I didn’t know how to respond. I could feel some syllables forming in my mouth but nothing would fit together or come out. I think I stammered a little. He looked at me as if to say “Was there something else?” I could feel my eyes widen a little bit and the skin on the back of my head start to tighten, still trying to make sense of what was going on. I quietly said “Okay” and backed away from the door, stunned, into the area beside Joanne’s desk. I looked over at her and she mouthed “I’m sorry”. I guess it was that moment that brought me fully into this reality and I walked away. The whole episode took about fifteen seconds.

“I have nothing for you” … out of the approximately forty roles in all the productions in both theatres! Over the weeks ahead, I thought about the encounter and remembered how a male lion, when taking over a pride, did everything he could to rid himself of any of the previous alpha’s male offspring, either by killing them or forcing them out in order to thwart any threat of a challenge to his dominance. Any vestige of disciples from Richard’s regime was to be eradicated and that’s just what happened. It was maddening, sad and vindictive and it took me a long time to get over it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever really ever gotten over it!

I never exchanged another word with him and I didn’t work at MTC for two years. Eighteen months later he was gone, fired for breach of contract!

 

NEXT: In High Demand

That Summer I was homeless … “of no fixed address” as the media puts it. My addresses were American Express Offices in London, Paris, Vienna, Florence, Innsbruck and Munich.

I walked. I barged. I hiked. I trudged. I purged, divesting myself of familiar and comfortable mindsets and was launched into experiences I’d never had before. Untethered, I walked the “Pilgrim’s Way” from London to Canterbury along the North Downs in Surrey and Kent. I barged the Oxford Circle outside London for seven days with two people I’d never met before. I hiked the Alps for a week with a hiking Club in the Stubaital outside Innsbruck earning five “kasermandl” (little mountain trolls) certificates, in the process. I rented a villa for three weeks in Impruneta outside Florence and hosted Lorne Kennedy and Goldie Semple for a week. But mostly, I walked. And cried. And laughed at myself. And slowly, I urged myself into a semblance of normalcy. It took a long time – I was away for four months – but I got there.

I saw few performances while away. Gemma Craven in A.L.Webber’s “Song and Dance” in London is still in my emotional memory. An astonishing production of “Die Meistersinger” in a small regional opera house outside Innsbruck remains embedded in there too. But little else. I had made my mind up to stay away from theatres for the Summer and stuck to my guns … for the most part. I did succumb to some shows once back in Canada. How can one not when one is visiting cherished friends in Stratford and Niagara on the Lake. Those weeks were a transition back to my real world.

I returned to Winnipeg in the Fall, calmer, and ready to continue where I left off. But it didn’t quite work out that way. I hadn’t been cast in “A Tale of Two Cities” which opened the Company season because I was returning too late for the start of rehearsals, and I discovered I needed something to do. Fortunately, by now, I’d made something of a mark in the city and was asked to work at Stage West, the city’s only Dinner Theatre. For some reason I still can’t really understand, back in those days a Dinner Theatre production was rarely mounted without a “star” in the lead role. Dinner Theatre was considered the “end of the road” for aging movie or television performers. My last experience had been many years earlier in Seattle with

Howard Keel (who actually went on to a major revival of his career in the TV series “Dallas”) and now I was teamed up with Henry Jones. “Henry who?” you might ask? His picture is at the left here and for those of us “of a certain age” it is one of those faces you’ve seen so many times before but never knew the name!

The play was Alan Ayckbourn’s “How The Other Half Loves”, a farce of epic proportions following the consequences of an adulterous affair between a married man and his boss’s wife and their attempts to cover their tracks by roping in a third couple to be their alibi, resulting in a chain of misunderstandings, conflicts and revelations. Confusing? That was the whole point. The action centers around two dinner parties happening in different places at different times but with everyone on the same set on stage at once. Miraculously, audiences buy into the conceit and hilarity ensues.

I can use only one word to describe Henry … “laconic”. He was in his early seventies when I worked with him. Just like the characters he usually played in film and television he had a slow, drawling and deliberate delivery, was incredibly funny and had done his role in this play many times before. That was a danger in itself. His advanced years (and experience) made him somewhat cantankerous and impatient and that showed itself a number of times over the course of rehearsals (and a couple of times in performance) especially when one of us would “break”. “Breaking” is, essentially, an inability to maintain self-control in a scene and give in to laughter. It is a result of actual reality intruding or breaking in on the actor’s created reality, reminding us how ludicrous a particular situation was. (Think of those moments during any number of “The Carol Burnett Show” episodes on television.) It was VERY easy to break in this play.

Toward the end of Act One, one character, out of anger, has to dump a tureen of soup and noodles over the head of another. That “other” was me! The wonderful character actress, Miriam Newhouse, played my wife and, under the “right” circumstances, had a very low breaking point. She had a pixie-like face topped off with huge glasses which magnified the dangerous twinkle in her eyes when she was about to “go”. When the tureen was dumped over me the audience would explode. I would sit there, noodles dangling over my face, soup dripping into my lap, and slowly look up, aghast at what had just happened. This slow look would provoke the audience to a bigger laugh. We would then shift in our swivel chairs into the second dinner party and continue on for a mercifully short while to end the Act. That would make the audience laugh even more as I sat there, noodles dangling from my head and liquid dripping off the end of my nose as if nothing had happened. I would look over at Miriam sitting opposite me praying that she would maintain. Once I saw her eyes widen and her lips begin to purse, I knew it was over.

The first time we broke in rehearsal Henry went ballistic! He started yelling about us not being professional and how we had no idea what acting was all about and stormed off to the Green Room! That sobered us up a bit. Well, maybe not so much. His tirade and exit made us laugh all the more. But we had to get it out of our systems. For a performer, that kind of detour from the reality we had set up for the audience was a huge no-no. We collectively apologized to our Star knowing full well that he was right, pulled ourselves together and continued on with the rehearsal. It didn’t happen again … until one performance.

We were well into the run. Our houses had been spectacular, both in size and response, and we were riding a wave of adulation and favour both in the theatre and, frequently, on the street when people would stop to tell us how much they enjoyed the show. There is really never a time to get complacent in the theatre. Often one has to resist falling into a mind-numbing routine and playing it by the numbers. It’s hard to dredge it up eight times a week as a run goes on and on. But we bear responsibility to the audience to give them our best, so we are disciplined, we maintain and are always in control. We had not had a “break” since rehearsals.

The “soup” comprised a lot of noodles (for maximum visual effect) and a goodly amount of water. Since the tureen would sit backstage for a long while until required during one of the dinner parties, the water was initially very hot so it would be comfortably warm when it was dumped over me. It was our second show of the day at the end of a long week well into our long run. To save time, stage management had, on this particular day, decided to set up the props table for the evening show right after the matinee. This, of course, included the tureen. Between shows the backstage area was aired out with a door open onto the alley to make everything “fresh” for the evening show and to cool off the guys in the hot kitchen downstairs. It was late November!

The show was rollicking. We could do no wrong. The laughs were uproarious and sustained at all the right places. We got to the dumping moment and, as always, I internally prepared myself for the deluge. The shock of the now freezing cold water took my breath way and I let out a huge gasp and then a high squeal of surprise. There was a suspended moment and the audience went nuts. I looked over at Miriam as usual. She’d not heard that sound come out of me before. Her eyes widened and her lips pursed and I could see she was going to lose it. All I could think of was how Henry was going to react. Miriam started to dissolve and I followed, both of us very gradually turning chairs into the other dinner party, but not before the audience saw what was happening to us … which made them laugh all the harder … which made us laugh all the harder!. The real world had intruded upon the whole room but we had to keep going.

Through the dangling noodles I could see Henry’s face getting redder and redder as he became apoplectic. He stood up and screamed his remaining lines of the scene at the top of his lungs and the lights faded. The audience was still laughing and the applause started to grow. We all stumbled off stage in hysterics, but at the same time bracing ourselves for the deserved tirade that now came at us in the dark. He refused speak to us until the middle of the following week.

Henry died in 1999 at the age of 87. I celebrated his life by telling that story to some friends at a party. And it struck me how this path I’ve chosen to take in my life is made up of moments that, unbidden, get meaningfully lodged in the recesses of the brain for a reason. They remind us of the fragility and vulnerability of being an artist, always subject to external forces, sometimes beyond our control, against which we push in order to open pathways of understanding, both for ourselves and others during our short journeys in this place.

I’ve always considered performing to be holy in some ways. We are tasked with being guiding spirits at times, providing solace, stimulation, confrontation, confirmation, and while the words we speak or sing might not be our own, we use them to provoke responses, be they laughter or tears, to make us all aware of our frailty … complete with soup and noodles!

There’s nothing like double paychecks! While the “Other Half” contract was winding down in the evening at Stage West, I was in multiple daytime Company rehearsals at MTC for Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi” and Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”, which were to be performed on the Mainstage in rep through the early winter months, and for Christopher Durang’s double bill “The Actor’s Nightmare” and “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All For You” at MTC’s Warehouse Theatre! Could this get any more complicated? I felt sorry for Stage Management trying to organize my rehearsal schedule for all four plays. Because the Mainstage shows were being done in rep and because they were both huge productions, the rehearsal period was extremely long. And because my roles were very small, it was thought that doing two bigger roles in the second stage wouldn’t be too much of a chore for me. Seriously??

“Duchess” is an incredibly dark revenge tragedy which Richard had chosen to set in Mussolini’s Italy, making the atmosphere even more depressing (think “Garden of the Finzi-Continis”). At the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum was “Much Ado About Nothing” all light and sunshine, bright and funny. That was being directed by Louis Sheeder, a producer at the Folger Theatre Group in Washington and Professor at the Tisch School in New York. While I disappeared into the background of “Duchess” (and actually remember very little about) my role of ‘Balthazar – a singer’ in the Shakespeare got bigger and bigger as time went on. Louis had commissioned a lot of music for a production he’d done 6 years earlier in DC and this served as a foundation for the expansion of my initially small role. It was a lot of fun, very satisfying and my pipes were given a good work-out singing the Shakespeare Songs for transitions and within scenes for atmosphere. Above is a group photo of Peter Smith, Maggie Askey, Debbie Grover, Tommy Anniko and myself all looking hugely happy with ourselves, (except for Peter who was forever trying to get himself out of his murderous ‘Bosola’ mindset in “Duchess” for “Much Ado” performances!).

Meanwhile, rehearsals for “Sister Ignatius” and “Nightmare” proceeded apace across the street. “Nightmare” concerned the dreams performers often have about being on stage with no idea what play they are in or what they are supposed to say or do. It was directed by Don Scardino, another New York director, and a friend to this day. A gentle, sweet, sensitive man, Don guided us through the minefields in both plays. I was playing ‘Henry Irving’, the grand English Actor, and remember still the response I got every night at my initially improvised entrance. I would come in at the back of the theatre and work my way to the center aisle through the last row of the audience, jostling, making as much commotion as I could to draw attention saying “Excuse me. Pardon me. Sorry. Excuse me” all the way along the row. Just as I reached the last seat, would jump out into the aisle startled, imperiously look back at the nearest lady in the row, draw myself up and exclaim “Madame!! You must NEVER touch an actor!!” The audience would dissolve. Great entrance!

“Sister” wasn’t quite so easy. I must mention that back then, parallel to my professional life, I lived a firmly Faith-based existence. At one point during the play, which is a savage but very funny criticism of the Catholic Church, my character, ‘Gary’, has to nail a baby Jesus doll to a cross. I hated doing that every night. Absolutely hated it. Don and I had many conversations about that moment. He had played hundreds of performances as ‘Jesus’ in “Godspell” on Broadway and had some comforting insights about his own faith and balancing actions that might viewed as less than “faith-full” while on stage. It helped but I never really settled in to any sense of acceptance about that personally hateful moment. Eventually, many years later, I came to realize that a special part of me was an ability to feel one way and act another when required. The challenge of trying to separate my personal truth from a truth I had to play on stage was overcome incrementally over a long time but ended up being strangely satisfying. Both Warehouse shows ultimately, exhaustingly, went very well, and just after the New Year, we opened the Rep on the Mainstage and plodded our way through the two months of the runs.

It was during this period that word began to circulate about Ouzounian leaving MTC and taking over as Artistic Director of Centerstage in Toronto. To the Company, this was devastating news. We had experienced three and a half years of wondrous work and had become a close-knit Family. The future looked very uncertain. As the thought of Richard’s departure set in, two things happened to me.

The first was realizing that work wasn’t going to be the automatic slam dunk as it had been for the years previous. One tends to get complacent when the silver plate is extended year after year. I had to start thinking about how to get the time ahead in order. Fortunately, I had developed a good reputation in Canadian West and, as I discovered, opportunities began to present themselves rather quickly. Even before the season ended, I had auditioned for and been cast in a number of productions. I had even auditioned for Stratford, but because of conflicts, that never worked out. It turned into a case of birds in the hand versus the bush.

The second thing that happened was driven by ego. At the encouragement and urging of a lot of people, and with some degree of trepidation, I threw my hat into the ring and applied for Richard’s job. That was crazy … and scary. Of course I’d never been in Management and had only a performing background to offer on my application. But I did know the Manitoba Theatre Centre and they knew me … in spades. To make that part of a long story short and to spare you any anticipation as to the result, I didn’t get that job; but not before a LOT of great meetings and wonderful conversations happened. Even as it was happening, I viewed it all positively both as a character building and learning experience.

“Much Ado” had been booked into the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and our last weeks as a Company were, unfortunately, spent far from home. At least we were all together when the end came. Richard had come into town for the closing and, after toasts and hugs at an Italian restaurant across from the Arts Center, simply and sadly, it ended. The following morning, everyone flew away in different directions, and while we would see each other in times ahead, it was the end of an Era.

I landed back in Winnipeg and hit the ground running.

(One promise I made to a couple of posts back was to find a photo of Richard Ouzounian who subbed in as ‘Lady Bracknell’ in “Earnest” after dear Maggie Askey broke her hip. With the help of Brian Paul I attach at left said photo. I hope The Boss doesn’t mind. I include it here with great love and respect, and this is a wonderful memory (for many of us) of a great performance, short though it was! )

The Summer of ’82 was like a movie. Long, warm days coupled with the Eastern Oregon landscape lulled me into a mellow state of mind with nothing negative inserting itself into the flow. Work on the new Season back in Winnipeg was to begin in mid-August, but in the meantime and for the most part I was enveloped by Love and Languor.

There were delightful interruptions however. I had some Symphony commitments to take care of. Three Irving Berlin Concerts in Denver jolted me back to the energy of big city life, and the whirlwind of rehearsals and performances with Norman (Leyden) serviced my soul in the late spring. A few weeks later, it was off to Milwaukee for more of the same. One of the most interesting things about doing the Berlin concerts had always been an Orchestra’s initial reaction to the material. Berlin’s music is incredibly familiar, easy and very accessible. It ain’t Mahler by any stretch of the imagination, but Norman’s arrangements challenged the players in ways they didn’t always expect. With Norman’s arrangements, it wasn’t a case of playing through static chord progressions but rather of navigating complex and interesting charts that never took the musicians for granted. His arrangement for “Isn’t It A Lovely Day” began with a huge “William Tell Overture”-like orchestral storm that eventually settled into the song. Another Berlin song, “The Piccolino” had been arranged in the style of classical composer Gioachino Rossini. Norman introduced it as “Piccolino a la Rossini – doesn’t that sound delicious?” Some orchestras bought into it, others maybe not so much – at first. POPS Concerts, while being bread and butter for a lot of Symphonies in the US and Canada, were lesser relatives to concerts of the “real” music they normally played. However, because of Norman’s obvious love for and mastery of the genre, we usually won the musicians over in short order. To sing with 60 professionals playing beautifully with you is like nothing else on earth. All of the symphony concerts I ever did over the years (and there were a LOT of them) were a gift from heaven. I loved doing them!

Two other assignments took up some more time that summer. Portland is called “The City of Roses” and each June is consumed, on every conceivable level, by the Portland Rose Festival. Dozens of events are spread over a ten-day period and KBPS Radio decided that since I was back in town I would be the perfect radio host to do “colour commentary” for three events – The Rose Queen Coronation, The Starlight Parade and The Grand Floral Parade – as part of “The Seeing Sound” programming. I’m pretty good at holding my own in an off-the-cuff spewing of words as I’d done any number of times during the annual Pledge Weeks at the Radio Station. Getting people to send in money and support a good cause is one thing. But this was something else! Try describing the same thing over and over and over again to a blind person and make it sound interesting.

The Coronation event wasn’t so bad because we had direct feed from the announcers on stage introducing the various Princesses representing the city’s schools. Describing the gowns was pretty much extent of our responsibility. I was teamed up with a former Rose Queen – thank God! – to provide some the finer details. However, the Parades were another thing altogether!

The Starlight Parade was, of course, held at night. Kevin, the station’s chief engineer and co-commentator, and I were stationed on the second floor of a parking structure overlooking the parade route. Fortunately, this event was being taped for later broadcast so the pressure didn’t seem quite so great. The irony of all this was the fact that the only illumination came from the lights strung on the various floats that passed by and we had about twenty seconds to try to convey to our listeners what we were seeing and the excitement of the watchers on the street below. Once the floats had passed, we were plunged into complete darkness until another would come along. We were as blind as our listeners. I never did hear how the tape turned out.

On Grand Floral Parade day it was cold. And it rained! And rained! Bundled up (and this was June!) and huddled under our umbrellas at our table just outside the Coliseum’s big exit doors we were at the mercy of the organizers. And we were “live on air”. These things never start on time and to banter for what seemed ages before the first float came out of the arena doors was torture. Out of the dry warmth inside the Coliseum, each float, band and dance group would slowly pass through the doors into what seemed like the start of a car wash. Within seconds, everything and everybody was soaked … and they still had two hours of marching and playing and waving to go! I felt sorry for them and said so any number of times on air, but we carried on, describing the colour and shape and size of the floats, and letting the bands fade in and out as they passed our table. At least the rain kept the flower-encrusted floats fresh and bright.

I managed to do some more work for the radio station up-dating a number of the radio series I’d done years before and creating a new 16-part series called “The Tale Spinner”. And that was the last time I worked at KBPS. It’s wistful to think of the hours and hours spent in the studios there. Radio doesn’t seem to have any meaning these days. It’s mostly background noise and, with the exception of Public Radio from time to time, there is little to service the mind and elevate the heart. I hate to say it, and will probably say it again, but “Ah, the old days!”

The summer wound down and I (actually, happily, “we”) returned to Winnipeg for the new Season. Rehearsals started early that year and were extended by a couple of weeks as the opening production of “Nicholas Nickleby” was a new adaptation by Ouzounian and was massive on every level. The Royal Shakespeare Company had presented their version which took two days to perform (!) but ours was somewhat pared down. I said “somewhat”.

“Nick-Nick”, as we ended up calling it, was a sprawling tale by Charles Dickens which, as most Dickens novels do, spanned many years in many places with many, MANY characters. Fortunately for me, I was cast as ‘Newman Noggs’, the elderly retainer of the Nickleby Family, who has an important track throughout the story. As such, I didn’t have to play other characters. Others were not so “lucky”. Some folks had five or six parts to deal with and this often lead to some hilarious confusion in accents, locales, make-up, hair and costume changes. After weeks of intense rehearsals we landed at our first non-stop run-through of the play. It lasted five hours!! (No wonder the RSC played it over two nights!) Needless to say, a five hour performance wasn’t going to work for the Winnipeg Audiences. The next day the cutting began.

One major segment of the story had to do with Nicholas’s and Newman’s time spent with the poor Kenwig Family, which, while a very touching diversion in the story, added little to the advancement of the plot. In one sad stroke of the artistic knife, they were amputated from the show and, from then on, any character that was axed had “gone to Kenwig Heaven”.  The cutting was merciless but needed. The cast came in each morning never knowing what Richard had decided overnight and whether they would be “alive” at the end of the day. This went on for a long time until things were in acceptable shape and the running time had become a manageable three hours. However, that was just the performer side of things. There was also the set!

Big shows call for big concepts. Richard always liked to move the art form forward, to take a difference approach, to mix things up a bit. SO, it was decided that computers would be used to control all the movement of the set pieces on stage! Um … computers? Remember, this was 1982! What could possibly go wrong? The set consisted of two immense, moveable, monolithic, three-level towers which would trundle from side to side to create new locations or as people carriers, and two large “cookies” or floating floors set into the stage on which furniture and other set pieces could be placed and then motored into the correct position from either side of the stage. At least that was the idea.

There is something to say for the heroism of any tech crew working a show. They have to deal with the unexpected, constantly at hand, unnoticed, to fix any number of errors, always mindful of the fact that they too are a part of the audience’s suspension of disbelief. The “Nick-Nick” crew was incredible … and then some! The precision of the towers and cookies worked incredibly well – for the most part. There were points in stage rehearsals and previews when techies would be slithering about under the stage floor physically moving a cookie inch by inch to get it into the proper position for us to play a scene. Kinks were constantly being worked out and the controls were fine tuned, but not before the inevitable (and obvious) “errors” occurred.

For the final celebratory Dining Room Scene at the end of the play, the cookies are preset off stage with two tables, one on each of the cookies, pushed together to create one long table covered with a table cloth and a dinner setting for eight including crystal and candelabras. (You can see the set-up in the photo above.) The twinned cookies elegantly float on like magic and the scene played out. During one preview the grandly set table moved into position as we entered from upstage to join it. We did the scene culminating in glasses raised in a toast as the lights begin to slowly fade. For some reason that night, the computer decided to skip a cue and the cookies slowly started off carrying us and the setting …  in opposite directions! We were all standing in a freeze as this happened. I can still see the eight of us physically tense up and our eyes grow wider as a chasm began to grow between us … AND the tables!!

There was a precise moment when we all realized what was happening as we slowly drifted away from each other. As if it had been rehearsed, the eight of us, while still holding our glasses, deftly – and I do mean deftly – each grabbed plates, silverware, the candelabras and some crystal along with most of the other pieces that made up the setting on the now completely stretched out table cloth as the lights went out. There were a few crashes in the dark as some of the things we couldn’t reach in time fell as one half of the table cloth sank to the floor. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been had we not still been on stage! We shared our incredulity off-stage!

On opening night, Richard told me that he had got down on his knees in his kitchen after dinner and prayed to God that the set work properly. It did and, for most of the run too. Jamie Portman, national critic for the Southam News wrote “Canada has never before seen a stage event which quite matches the scope and boldness of Manitoba Theatre Center’s new version of “Nicholas Nickelby”. Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company has been winning international headlines for managing to reduce this mammoth 1,000-page novel to nine hours playing time, spread over two evenings. But MTC artistic director Richard Ouzounian has done what the RSC declared to be impossible”. The Company rested on that laurel for quite a while!

Work didn’t stop with opening. After the opening weekend we were into rehearsals for “The Fifth of July”, and in constant Company fencing classes for the down-the-road productions of “The Three Musketeers” and “Richard III”.  Rehearsing a 1977 “hard-ass” character in a contemporary drama (“Fifth of July”) during the day and playing an 1837 “noble eccentric” in a Victorian melodrama in the evening required a fast mental and attitudinal adjustment, but it all felt so right, comfortable. I also had to steal moments when I could to learn lines and to work on the music for the up-coming “The Man Who Came To Dinner” in which I had to sing and play the piano as ‘Beverly Carlton’. As I had always dreamed, I was now eating, breathing and sleeping theatre. It was all-consuming to the exclusion of everything else and just a bit overwhelming. There is usually no half way with me. When I’m in it, I’m really in it with, from time to time, some ironic and unhappy results.

‘Beverly Carlton’ was modeled after the legendary Noel Coward, a friend of playwrights Kaufmann and Hart. Coward was a larger-than-life character in the English theatre and social circles in the 30’s and 40’s. At the helm of this production was Broadway Director/Choreographer Danny Siretta, who had worked with Coward many years previous and gave me a crash course on Sir Noel’s physical characteristics. To get this kind of personal insight from a Director is rare. Usually, everyone is flying blind with only the Director’s interpretation of the piece as the course of action. As actors, we buy into that (for the most part), putting our trust in a Director’s vision. In this case, our Director had a real-world connection with my character and I luxuriated in the truth that Danny gently and so graciously imparted to me. It filled out one aspect of ‘Beverly’s’ personality and gave it depth and dimension. He showed me how Coward would smoke a cigarette and demonstrated a physical quirk of Coward’s … that his whole body moving as if his head started at his waist! Dan made me relax into the character. ‘Beverly’ appears only in the second Act and does a kind of “star turn”, accompanies himself on the piano and tells jokes, being quite grand and making everyone laugh. Along with a few other roles I’ve played over the years, I remember this one with great joy and fondness!

After the holiday, we returned to work. I was honoured to find myself as the Cover Boy for the Theatre’s Fundraising brochure that year (a photo from “Sondheim”). The season continued in full force with Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and an adaptation of Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers”. It was in “Richard III” rehearsals that my hand had a run-in with a broadsword and I bare the scar on my right thumb to this day. In “Musketeers” I played ‘Rochefort’ complete with eye patch (see-through thankfully), the consummate villain, who, as the local critic put it, was “a determined brawler so ineffectual we cannot understand how he has lived so long”. I was never sure if that was a critique of the character or my performance.

And then.

I wrote above about the all-encompassing nature of the way I threw myself into my work. While being singularly focused and looking one way, something was happening in another direction about which I was completely unaware. Sometimes, one thinks everything is going along just fine and it’s really not. The “We have to talk” conversation came out of the blue for me and in short order the “We” of my life once again became “I”. I felt incredibly guilty and stupid and sad that I had missed the markers, those little signs which, in hindsight, were clues to problems brewing. But I was consumed with “me” and, obviously, that wasn’t working for “we”. We separated, but not too far apart because, as fate would have it, we had been cast as lovers in the next production!!

“Cloud Nine” by Caryl Churchill is a challenging and, for want of a better word, “weird” little play. The first Act is set in British Colonial Africa in the Victorian era, the second in London in 1979. Even though the Acts are a hundred years apart, the characters have only aged 25 years between Acts I and II. In the play, some men play women at times and some women play men. Some play the same character in different acts, some don’t. Get all that? The play creates an obscure parallel between colonial and sexual repression and delivers a message about accepting people for who they are and not forcing them into limiting social roles. Whew! It was directed by one of our own, Lorne Kennedy. I won’t go into the plot – you can Google it – but even as we rehearsed it, it was confusing and daunting. Our challenge, one which we faced every night of the run, was in making it all clear and understandable for the audiences. As a result, our portrayals had to be based in honesty, specific intentions and truth in the relationships. In the past, I had occasionally used performance as a means of escape, to relinquish stress and turmoil in my life and live as someone else for a couple of hours. Not this time!

In Act I, I played ‘Clive’, a colonial administrator consumed with keeping order in family upheaval. It’s a rollicking, tumbling, absurd romp of manners and cross-over relationships. That was easy. In Act II I was ‘Gerry’, a gay man and lover to ‘Edward’, played by … well, guess who. This Act does a one-eighty in tone and mood, and the glibness and humour of Act I is replaced by a serious examination of sexual attitudes and their implications. This was hard. As my real-life relationship disintegrated, our on-stage lives were based in a deep love, the desire to get married and spend the rest of our lives together. There were moments in rehearsal that became very difficult for both of us. We found ourselves speaking as the characters but knowing that we had said variations these words to each other in real life. We were watched by the rest of the cast, all of whom knew what we were going through. If nothing else, we added a measure of reality to our scenes together. While this juxtaposition produced deep, dimentionalized portrayals it was, nonetheless, painful, awkward at times, and hammered away at us night after night. Neither before nor since have I had that kind of experience on stage … and I know I never want to have it again.

The season ended and quietly, calmly, and we walked away from each other in different directions. Our eyes wouldn’t meet again for 18 years.

From time to time, one becomes aware of a soundtrack that is quietly playing in the background our lives, music that fills the heart more than the head and gently comforts us in basic and secure ways. For me, in the Autumn of 1981, it was the music of Dan Fogelberg and Michael Franks. During the previous summer, I had found a deep, all-consuming love that had a score played daily on the stereo, songs like “The Reach”, “Since You Ask”, “Longer Than”, “Netherlands”, “Dragonfly Summer”, and now, far from that Love, these evocative and heartfelt songs played through my days reminding me of what I had left behind and now yearned for with every fibre of my being. Not a great way to begin working on “The Tempest” as my first full season at MTC started. Nevertheless, there it was.

The production was being done in The Warehouse (now The Tom Hendry) which was MTC’s smaller space (and configured very differently from what it is today – there were no walls back then!!!). I was playing ‘Antonio” opposite Kimble Hall as ‘Sebastian’. We were the villains. The great thing about being part of a Resident Company is the trust and security one feels when you have nothing to prove to anyone and can feel safe making mistakes. We launched into Richard Ouzounian’s concept with focus and determination. The production was minimalist in its production values. The opening music was by Brian Eno (either from the “Deru” or “Neroli” albums, I can’t remember which) and right from the outset created an otherworldly, fantasy ambience in which both the performers and audience lived for the two hours of the play. My experience with Shakespeare up to this point had been in straightforward, traditional productions. This was eye opening and mind blowing and very, very exciting. A scene’s locale, mood and emotional tensions were defined merely by light. There were no sets to speak of, just the definition of an area picked out of the huge black void in which we were playing by shafts of light or a swath of colour on the floor.

BG music: Fogelberg – “The Reach”; sustained by long distance phone calls; letters

As we progressed through the rehearsals in the studio, we had only the vaguest of ideas of how this high concept was going to look and feel but, like a magician, Richard provoked us to play our relationships very intimately, as if everything was in secret, mindful of being overheard by anyone nearby except, of course, the audience, our co-conspirator. At times, it felt silly. The instinct was to “declaim” and here we were keeping everything incredibly guarded and low-keyed. But that is the point of the play, that everyone is keeping information from each other, no one really knows what anyone else is doing, all under the spell of ‘Prospero’ and his minions. The conspiratorial intimacy between ‘Antonio’ and ‘Sebastian’ developed in to something extremely private, homoerotic, some would say, setting the two characters apart from the rest on any number of levels. It was incredibly satisfying to get so connected to another performer like that and the depth of our relationship fueled our scenes in a way that was both dangerous and perversely attractive at the same time.

I now recognize that this production and the subsequent productions that season were the beginning of my journey beyond “technique”. Richard created environments that demanded we relinquish traditions and pre-conceptions of “playing” a role. I had worked for so many years getting the notes and the words “right”, depending on whatever charisma I had to fill in the rest of the performance. This new (for me) approach was exciting, challenging, maddening and so deeply satisfying.

While we performed “Tempest”, we went into rehearsal for “The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon” by W.O. Mitchell. Acting on-stage and curling at the same time … what could be more difficult? The plot concerns a small-town Alberta shoemaker who makes a wager with the Devil that the local curling team can beat the Devil’s team (Macbeth, Judas Iscariot and Guy Fawkes). The prize? The MacDonald Brier. Iconic Canadian fare, what?

BG Music: Fogelberg – “What I’ll Give You Since You Ask”; long distance calls; letters; a Christmas visit! No BG: real words and music; departure, again, resulting in more questions than answers; solo life returns as does the background music!

I had only curled once years before in Montreal and the lessons I now took at the Granite Club in Winnipeg made me remember why I hadn’t continued with the sport. Basically (and this is for my non-curling American readers – most of you, I think), curling is shuffleboard. On a one hundred and forty-foot long “sheet” of ice. Using a forty-pound granite rock with a handle. And brooms!  In curling, form is everything! One basically becomes a sliding tripod, swinging the forty pound rock like a pendulum while, at the same time, in a lunge position, sliding down the ice balanced on one foot with the other foot stretched out behind you, your free hand using the broom stretched out to your side to keep you from falling over and carefully aiming the rock toward the target, letting it ease out of your hand before you slide past the foul line!! My God!!

The play required that a curling sheet be constructed on which we would actually play the rocks from on-stage to off. The saga of getting the silicone surface of the sheet “right” in order for the game to look real would take much too much time to go into here. Suffice to say, it was eventually worked out only a couple of days before opening! While it didn’t matter where our rocks went once off stage (no one saw that, of course) our form had to look like we knew what we were doing. A Professional curler had been hired make sure the rocks curled from OFF-stage to ON-stage went where they were supposed to go. The drama depended on one team or the other getting closest to the target at certain points in the game and the dead-on precision of the Professional was our best bet to make that happen. The dialogue, and the story line, depended on it!! However, the talented but occasionally irascible Andrew Gillies, playing on the “good guys” team, had other ideas.

Unbeknownst to us, Andrew decided at some point that HE was proficient enough to do some of the curling himself from off-stage, executing the crucial throws that determined who was winning the game and about which we had a LOT of scripted dialogue. I mentioned that I was moving beyond just technique and working on giving my performances greater depth based in the character’s authenticity. Within the parameters firmly dictated by the script and established in rehearsals, we all lived our “lives” with a comfort and confidence that propelled the story forward. So, it was with great amazement one night that we became aware that the rocks coming from off-stage were not landing where they were supposed to resulting in our team having to do some serious improvising and come up with explanations for some very bad rock positioning all of which affected the crucial tensions about ‘Wullie’s’ ultimate fate! We’d yell off-stage as each wayward rock came sliding on. “Whoa, laddie, careful there!”, “A bit outside there!” “Slow ‘er down a wee mite there, boyo”, “No more drinking for you!” (Subtexts: “What the fuck is going on!!!”) We were trying to give some guidance to the Pro backstage while at the same time keeping our character’s voices and concerns real for the audience who were now becoming increasingly baffled by what was playing out before their eyes. Somehow, moving around behind each other, we managed to surreptitiously reposition the rocks to where they were supposed to be in order to get the desired result and the play finished as it was supposed to … just!

Naturally, once in the wings, we pounced on the Pro who, in his own defense and with no hesitation, pointed at Gillies as the villain. Needless to say, that never happened again!! We laughed about it after taking the renegade to task, but it taught me another lesson about being “in the moment” no matter what happens.

BG Music: Franks – “Dragonfly Summer; long distance phone calls, letters and more letters.

Altering Shakespeare has become a “thing” these days. Environments, time periods, and genders are all up for grabs in order to make a play more “relevant”, provocative or “interesting”. Back in 1982, that was not usually the way to go. Peter Brook had caused a big stir with his new vision of “Dream” at the RSC in the ‘70’s, but not a lot of other companies were daring enough to try something that “off-the-wall”. Never one to hold back, Ouzounian came through with a “Taming of the Shrew” set in … wait for it … WINNIPEG 1982!! If nothing else, it was fascinating to watch the concept evolve during our rehearsals. The framework was certainly there from the beginning, but fun was in the details! None of Shakespeare’s words were changed. No characters were altered. It was simply the physical environment AND the sound of the words.

I played ‘Tranio’, a part I had played long ago at Acadia. But certainly not like THIS!! Speaking Shakespeare with a French Canadian accent (yup!) took a lot of practice and concentration, but I discovered that using the accent made me think of the words in a different way. I had to be very specific and focused to make the words understandable and I luxuriated in that. I made my first entrance with ‘Lucentio’ on the back of a Harley-Davidson dressed as you see in the picture to the left (complete with the cigarette!). Roller skating, the Mackenzie Brothers, a faux Manitoba Lieutenant-Governor as one of the characters AND a swimming pool built into the stage floor were all elements of this rollicking production.

Like the “ice” in “Bonspiel”, the swimming pool, in which a number of characters spent time during the show, ended up requiring some major attention. A few days after it was used for the first time, folks discovered rashes developing on their legs. Something was growing in the pool!!! The water was turning green and it took a while to solve the problem. A techie’s life at MTC in those days was never dull! Fortunately, I never had to swim.

We were now well into the New Year and excitement was mounting as the playbill for the next season was quickly being put together. Everyone was a buzz about who would be playing what and the anticipation consumed the Company. Not me. My personal life was in a nose dive and despite calls, letters and the much too short Christmas visit, emotional upheaval inserted itself solidly into my day-to-day existence. Distance was my enemy and, while I loved what I was doing, I couldn’t reconcile living in Winnipeg with my heart desperately needing to be somewhere else. This state of mind was affecting my work, so much so that people started to notice. I was not the effusive, buoyant individual I had been and a thickness enveloped me all the time.

Always aware of what was going on in his Company, the Boss took me aside one day. “Hurstie, (that’s what he called me) how can we fix this?” I had no idea. My only solution, though painful, was to leave this wonderful Family and go where my heart needed to be. Richard had another idea. “How about this? I can create a new position for an acting intern, someone brought in to fill out some of the smaller roles in the large productions. Would that work”? Even writing his words all these years later makes me choke up. Richard’s devotion and compassion knew no bounds. He was committed to us in ways most folks never knew. I could hardly believe it! And the wheels were set in motion.

There were still two shows to go in the season. However, I had a three-performance Symphony commitment in Pittsburgh that had been set a year earlier and on which Richard had signed off. It was strange watching “Shrew” the night before I left with an understudy playing my role! It was a very different interpretation and my visceral reactions had me squirming in my seat, physically responding to the “incorrect” line deliveries and the “wrong” facial reactions. I was back after the weekend (which was also an emotional breather) and into rehearsals for the next show.

“Side By Side By Sondheim” was, for me, the jewel in the crown that year. I had done the show before in the States (along with “Forum” and “Night Music”) and was very comfortable with the material. The lyrics and music of Stephen Sondheim are the pinnacle in the world of Musical Theatre. The depth and complexity of his songs have challenged performers for more than half a century and now I was to luxuriate in them once again. There were three of us singing (Illana Zaramba, Tracy Dahl and myself) and Richard took on the ‘Narrator’. The intimacy of the Warehouse space suited the revue style of the show and the experience was incredibly satisfying, particularly getting to hear Tracy sing every night. To put it lightly, she was, and still is, magnificent! With a laser focus on the material and an inquisitiveness that resulted in an expanded understanding, she continues to amaze audiences around the world to this day. And, as a teacher, insists on the same commitment with her students. The words and the music must fit together. It is a performer’s responsibility to the creator and discovering each nuance and sharing it with an audience is why I love performing … and teaching.

The final show was Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, and for me it was another highlight in the season. This time I got to play TWO roles! In the first Act I was ‘Lane’, the ancient retainer to Algernon in London, and in the second Act, I was ‘Merriman’, the young retainer to Cecily Cardew in the country. (I played these two roles many years later and reversed the characters. Fun!)

I am hard pressed to state for an absolute fact how I approach a role. There are schools of acting that insist the approach be made from the inside; that is, creating a character using the deep inner thoughts and feelings as the sole defining elements. Then there are those who approach from the outside, deciding the personality and essence by how the character moves and looks and what he or she wears. I use both … at the same time. For me, one approach affects the other. You feel and act a certain way because you look a certain way and vice versa. Getting to play two completely opposite extremes of personality in the SAME play was a lesson in creating contrasts. The pictures sort of sum it up, don’t they?

Lorne Kennedy played ‘Algernon’, an irreverent, devil-may-care man about town and I was his valet. Lorne was (and is) a great actor, ready for just about anything on stage and not a little bit mischievous when he was really comfortable in a role. There had been more than a few occasions when he managed to break us up during a performance with a surreptitious look or words spoken up stage, under his breath and way out of character. This, of course, was very naughty, but went on anyway. ‘Lane’ was a very “old school” gentleman’s gentleman, extremely precise, meticulous and contained. One of his small idiosyncrasies, however, was to make small involuntary sounds – a feeble little ‘ah’ or a small groan under the exertion of lifting a cup and saucer – like very old people do. They didn’t happen very often; they just came out, sometimes at the most unexpected moments, even to me!

One night, I was standing beside ‘Algernon’, as he sat in his chair sipping wine  pontificating out to the audience about something or other when one of those little sounds managed to escape from my throat, a little “A-a-ah’. And in the middle of a word, Lorne lost it! Totally! It was a huge guffaw, so loud that it caught the attention of folks backstage who rushed into the wings to see what was going on. Even though it was unintentional (honestly, it was just ‘Lane’ being ‘Lane’ at that moment in time), I secretly took great pleasure in watching Lorne get some deserved comeuppance and struggle mightily for a long time to regain control. We laughed about it backstage, he congratulated me, and I made sure ‘Lane’ never did it again … at that point in the play.

Early in the run, the wonderful English actress Maggie Askey, our beloved ‘Lady Bracknell’, fell in the bathtub at home and broke her hip. This was tragic for a number of reasons. Of course, it was devastating for poor, elderly Maggie (who took a very long time to recover back in England) but also for the sold out show that night. Our productions at MTC did not have understudies (unless it had been arranged like I had back in ‘Shrew’) and there was no one in the cast who could move up because there was no one to replace a character at the bottom of the cast roster.

Leadership takes many forms and that night, it took the form of a very tall, baby-faced, and busty ‘Lady Bracknell’ as played by OUR leader, Richard Ouzounian!! Until our ‘Miss Prism’ got the lines down three nights later, Richard, with an elegantly disguised prompt script in hand, hit every note, got every laugh and undeniably saved the day. Of course, having directed the production, he knew all the details of the performance and carried it off with incredible aplomb! There are some things one cannot unsee in life. There exists, somewhere in my collection, a wonderful photo of his ‘Lady” but I can’t find it right now. I promise to keep searching, because I know you want to see it!!

With most of our roles for the next season firmly in place we bid each other farewell for a few months. And by now, I could barely contain myself. Oregon awaited me! And another Summer of Love was about to begin!

It was a strange sensation as I took flight from New York toward Portland and the future. A part of me, small though it was, wanted to stay and make that she-devil of a town give in to my demands of fame and fortune. Though I’d not lived there that long, she had taken a surprisingly deep hold of me and didn’t want to let go. Our pseudo-romance based in the “if-I-can-make-it-there-experience” still ricocheted in my head, but as the mileage between us increased my anticipation and excitement grew and I felt a freedom and sense of relief I’d not experienced for a while.

Landing in Portland I hit the ground running. It had been a little over a year since leaving, and coming back to the West Coast felt fresh, vibrant and so very clear. I was there to be the anchor host for KBPS’s “Seeing Sound” Fundraising Week and the action started right away. I was whisked off to the radio station for promos and interviews. Since “Radio Reader” Dick Estell had sadly gone down sick and was not able to join us as scheduled, the bulk of the on-air and interviewing work fell to me. In the months leading up to the event, I had taped a number of interviews in New York (the great film star Jane Powell (originally from Portland and with whom I had Howard Keel in common), Leslie Denniston (also from Portland and a good friend with whom I’d worked a number of times and who ended up on Broadway in “Pippin” and on TV in “As The World Turns”), Howard Hessman from “WKRP in Cincinnati”) and was scheduled to do live phone interviews with Sally Struthers (“All in the Family”) and David Ogden Stiers (“M*A*S*H”) as well as some local performers and celebrities.

The studio was small and a lot of folks were crammed into the tiny space making it intimate and all slightly breathless. During the week, I had spoken briefly to my live guests in advance of going on-air, and managed to maintain the chatty banter about their support for and the importance of Public Radio and Educational Broadcasting, and stories from their professional lives. My final interview for the week was with Sally Struthers. This was something special. I’d neither met nor spoken to her before that evening, but in the few minutes on the phone before we went live, we had introduced ourselves to each other and I found her to be very relaxed, engaging and very funny. In response to my first on-air and rather generic interview question about being a big star working in television she declared “Oh come on, Richard. We know each other better than that!” and we launched into a long, rather personal conversation about being in show business and the trials and tribulations and rewards we’d both experienced. The folks in the studio and the studio itself all seemed to disappear as we laughed and commiserated and cajoled each other to the point where I hated to say goodbye to her. People commented afterward that it sounded like we were old friends just catching up. It was a memorable night. Over the week, we managed to raise $25,000.00 for the station and I was very happy to have been a part of it. But it was time to say goodbye to Portland (again) and head North; but not before lining up a lot of work for the summer back with the Summer Rep. at Portland Civic Theatre. Gotta keep it moving, right?

In the summer of 1963, the cross-country train from Montreal to Banff (and the School of Fine Arts) had a stop in Winnipeg for an hour. I got off to stretch my legs and wandered out to the front of the station to have a look around. Main Street stretched out to my right and left. The land was flat for miles and miles around and it was hot and dusty and brown. My only thought was “who would ever want to live here!?” I got back on the train and headed to the Rockies. Little did I know that twenty years later that hot, dusty town would be the center of my universe for almost thirty years!

It was pretty cold coming out of the airport (the end of February will always be miserable in Winnipeg) but I was there, finally, anxious and excited to get going. The Manitoba Theatre Centre was incredible! I felt like I had moved from the moat into the castle as far as theatre conditions were concerned. This was a long established professional theatre in every way – as I mentioned earlier, MTC was Mecca as far as Canadian Theatre went – and the staff welcomed me (as they did every performer) with incredible generosity and respect. That pervading attitude had obviously been set by the person at the top of the chain, Richard Ouzounian, the Artistic Director. As I quickly came to understand, he was generous, loyal and devoted, patient and, above all, compassionate. It was “Mr. Hurst” at every meeting and encounter with department heads and staff. I was in heaven!!

My first play at MTC was Bernard Pomerance’s “The Elephant Man” playing ‘Sir John’. This was its Canadian premiere and we launched into rehearsals two days after my arrival (which gave me time to buy gloves and a down coat and boots!!!). For years I’d always regarded myself as something of a grunt when it came to working in the Theatre. By that I mean I considered what I did to be work at the demand of others – the director, the designers, the producers. Of course, there was a degree of recognition as a result of the work I’d done, but my reality was usually one of toiling in dark basement rooms at odd hours for minimal pay. It was rewarding on a personal and creative level but the ambience in which it played out was just a bit shoddy and gloomy and not a little bit second rate. Perhaps I had allowed that to identify me even in my own mind. I guess that thinking was a vestige of New York I was still hanging on to. I was now in The Light!

I quickly learned the difference between being pushed or dragged though the rehearsal period and being guided through it. A respect for personal process was the foundation for an emotionally safe and protected environment which, to this day, is my basis for directing. Working in that production with the likes of Lorne Kennedy, David Schurmann and John Innes was a daily Master Class in a considered approach and execution, absolute focus and attention to detail. It also taught me not to be quite so serious about the craft all the time. These were incredibly funny men and the combination of work and play was glorious! For me, those days laid a solid base for the next four years of the Acting Company that Richard eventually established and the work of which was considered to be, at least by Gina Mallett, the Toronto-based theatre critic, “fire on the Prairies”. Even as “Elephant Man” took to the boards in the evenings, we were on to other things during the day.

The next production was Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in which I played ‘Old Adam’. The luxury of developing a character assisted by a production team that listened to and considered one’s thoughts about costuming and wigs and make-up validated my approach and, as a result, my portrayal of this relatively small character within the play was praised if only because of that wonderful support. For everyone, the play was indeed “the thing” and our energies were singularly focused on making it as fine a production as it possibly could be.

The playbill for the next season evolved and I was asked back with a packet of roles which, to this day, I still shiver at: ‘Tranio’ in “Shrew”, ‘Antonio’ in “Tempest”, ‘Clock Charlie Brown’ in “Black Bonspiel” and “Side By Side By Sondheim”. Rehearsing Sondheim during the day and performing Shakespeare at night … well, who could ask for more! The season concluded with great celebration and we all headed in different directions to our various summer involvements already looking forward to being back together again in a few months. This had become my family and I was going to miss them.

I arrived Portland only a few months after having left and was into rehearsals for a Summer Rep. production of “Cole!”, a very classy revue of Cole Porter tunes that brought together some great friends with great voices. Never one to let the grass grow under my feet, I also started to develop and ultimately present a cabaret act for late night weekend shows with the great Ron Snyder at the piano in a cozy, small bistro called Dobie’s  in Portland’s Old Town. Performing Cole Porter during the evening and songs of other Musical Theatre composers I loved late at night set me down in a bubble of Bliss and Harmony. But there was something lurking in the back of my mind that didn’t feel quite right.

I realized, gradually, that I was in a kind of limbo. Where was I supposed to be? Over the previous two years I had moved from city to city and didn’t really have a home. Even in New York I had moved four times in the short period I was there. I slept on friend’s couches or in spare rooms. There were even a couple of houses I had rented for short periods. I hadn’t truly settled in Winnipeg because I was leaving again for Portland not that long after arriving. Where did I belong? Years later I came to understand the intricacies of a nomadic life. Some of the orchestra musicians I was contracting on extended show tours had, in a couple of cases, spent almost three years on the road, living out of suitcases in hotel rooms that changed every week. They told me you get used to it and develop a kind of routine that eases the feeling of being so unsettled and that’s what keeps you on an even keel. But at this point in time, I was actually “homeless”. I had no furniture, no dishes or cooking utensils, no book collection or shelves, no towels or bed sheets and it was beginning to affect me in ways I didn’t think I could do anything about. I found myself growing anxious for no apparent reason, edgy and nervous. Being without a home to call my own was taking a toll.

And then, on June 20^th, 1981, I fell massively in love.

I’m letting that just hang there for a moment. Bet you didn’t see THAT coming! Neither did I!! These posts are not about that aspect of my life (maybe some other time) but I mention it because, over time, it altered a great many perceptions of who I was as a performer … and as a person. I write “massively” because it consumed me as new love tends to do, completely, mightily!

By now I was into rehearsals for the next production on my schedule – Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” – and the Oregon summer was into its dog days. I was living in two places, one which I had rented and was rarely at, and the other with this Love that had very securely found its way into my life. There was a third place as well – the Theatre. I put it in last position because it had become that last place I wanted to be. The cabaret Late Nights at Dobie’s counted as part of the Romance and I felt, for want of a better word, “real” there. My songs were from my heart and, despite full houses, I was really singing to an audience of one. I had started to close off from the outside world and I couldn’t help myself. My time on stage as ‘Ambrose’ was an intrusion and I began to resent having to go to the Theatre. On the outside an observer might think I had everything going for me. In fact, I was incredibly conflicted. I knew the summer would soon end and that I had to go back to Winnipeg. What WAS this!? How was this supposed to WORK?!

While “Matchmaker” was still running I created more chaos for myself by directing a production of “Cabaret” to which I’d long ago committed myself for one of the theatres in town. Because of a poor casting decision on my part and a great deal of procrastination regarding replacement, I ended up playing the ‘Herr Schultz’ role (again) which just added to my upheaval.  In spite of taking on a huge voice-over project for an Evangelical organization in South America (yeah, I can’t figure that one out either), teaching some performance classes and being on a weekend softball team, I was desperately trying to make some sense of my personal life.

The summer slowly wound down and much too soon, it was time to head back to The Peg. Our leave-taking got all Rod McKuen-y and Dan Folgelburg-ish and was gut wrenching. But what could I do? Plans for visits had been made and I took some heart in that. But was the problem of a long-distance relationship going to affect my work and my focus in the months to come? As it turned out it did, but the perfect solution came from a most unexpected source!!

“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. The people ride in a hole in the ground”. That sort of sums things up, doesn’t it? The “act” of living in New York is very different from the dream of doing the same. I will admit to a period when I questioned my decision to move there. After the energy and excitement of the first few months, and then the show-less routine that began to settle in over the Spring and Summer of 1980, I was starting to tug at the bit once again. But it didn’t seem like there was anywhere to go. After all, this was New York, the pinnacle, wasn’t it? Where else was there?

I’d met a lot of people and made some good friends over the months. With Lincoln Center as the “center” of my world, the peripherals, like dance classes and acting classes, seemed to round me out and gave me, at least superficially, the feeling that I was doing something. But there was still that irrepressible urge to get on-stage and precious few opportunities to do so. The classes seemed to assuage that visceral desire.

I had been teaching a lot over the Portland years. Next to performing, it was what I loved best … and still do. I had developed classes in Musical Theatre performance and Auditioning and Acting techniques for young people and adults and those classes fulfilled me incredibly. To watch young people rise to the occasion and fearlessly respond to challenges, and to encourage older aspirants tackling the same challenges but with their very different mindsets based more in life experience and self awareness all served to make me a better performer myself. I was a proponent of side-coaching and a “what if” approach to my students. It was always a supportive and congenial atmosphere. These people became, through no fault of my own and for want of a better word, acolytes. One older student coined the name “Hurstians” I’m embarrassed to say, and nothing could sway them from that devotion and commitment, both to me, each other, and the classes. The approach was very different in New York.

Frank Corsaro (who passed away just a couple of weeks ago at the age of 92) was highly regarded as a director and teacher. His classes were hard to get into. I got in. One has to keep in mind that for an actor in New York, everything, EVERY thing was geared toward getting work … making money, not spending it. So the atmosphere in the room that first night was pretty intense. There were about twenty people and I could feel them all tugging at the bit to get in front of this revered man and impress him. Who knew where that could lead? Realistically? No where! But the tiniest chance that he might be casting something down the road created an on-going and somewhat ruthless pseudo-audition scenario.

I quickly learned that folks had been working on their “party pieces” for a long time and trotted them out, some shamelessly, for “The Man’s” response. I also learned that following the presentation of a scene in these classes the normal New York approach from the instructor was to ask “So, what did YOU think of that?” And then the class would descend into a heated back and forth between the teacher and the other students in the class about the pros and cons (but mostly cons – remember this was one big audition) of what they had just seen. The performer(s) would just sit on stage and try to find something constructive in what they were hearing from their rivals! I went through this gauntlet a couple of times with a number of scene partners and was just thankful that I had someone next to me who was experiencing the same thing I was and with whom I could commiserate and bitch over coffee following the class.

Corsaro was rarely at the classes. He was frequently out of town directing plays or operas and was usually replaced by a lesser light who wasn’t, well, Frank Corsaro. The only sub who caused a bit of a stir when he came into the room (and he did so a number of times) was Otto Preminger. Yeah, THAT Otto Preminger! His accent was very thick and he was hard to understand. He was in his late seventies and would sit in the chair with his cane and his bald head and squinty eyes and talk about his movies and the people with whom he had worked. That, despite his reputation, didn’t go down well with the students and a revolt was soon under way at the studio. We had paid for Frank Corsaro and that’s who we wanted. The class disintegrated and we got some of our money back.

Even now, thinking back, it was not a good feeling. Everything in New York felt so disconnected from reality. There was an urgency in the air that was exhausting. Dance classes were a bit more focused if only because dancing was a performing tool based mostly in techniques (jazz, tap, contemporary, ballet) and these techniques had specific vocabularies that could be used IN an audition, not AS an audition. I left those classes feeling I had accomplished something, like maintaining a center while doing a double pirouette or executing a “triple” in a time step.

The months drifted by. Giving the tours at Lincoln Center became just a paycheck and trying to find performing work was shunted to the back burner. The Roar of the Greasepaint? Not so much! Other small jobs came and went, one of which was helping to write a New York City Visitor’s Guide Book … as if New York needed another guide book! On the surface, this might sound like an interesting job, but my assignment, in my “spare” time, was to research and document the locations of and prices for all the parking lots in mid-town Manhattan! Reading that sentence back, I shudder at the memory. This job ranked up there with my short-lived nighttime stint on a Montreal golf course collecting night crawlers for fishing bait, or a summer unloading steel oil drums from a conveyer belt as a teenager or demonstrating Osterizer Blenders in the basement of Meier and Frank’s department store in Portland! There are a LOT of parking lots (and structures) in the middle of New York City!! I would walk up and down the side streets (those long, long cross-town streets extending off the Avenues) documenting the lot/structure location, number of stalls, hours of operation, and the mind-boggling complexity of the pricing – by the half-hour, hour, day, week; morning, afternoon and evening rates, week day rates, Saturday rates, Sunday rates and on and on. This job went on for months (like I said, there are a LOT of parking lots) but kept me physically active and making a few bucks. Then, over the month of December, the trajectory of my life changed!

John Innes, an old friend from my UBC/Vancouver days informed me that Richard Ouzounian, another colleague from Vancouver, had been appointed Artistic Director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. Richard had become an “enfant terrible” in the Canadian theatre scene, innovative, provocative and affectionately known as “The Campbell Soup Kid”. Hesitantly, I wrote to find out if he was “jobbing in” at all, reminding him of our time working together all those years ago. MTC is fabled in Canadian Theatre history. Headed by the legendary John Hirsch, it was Mecca as far as goals went for an actor in Canada. Each morning we symbolically bowed three times to the West (Winnipeg) when I was a student at Sir George. It was revered as the crucible of the regional theatre movement in Canada. Amazingly, Richard got back to me and offered me two shows in the New Year – “The Elephant Man” and “As You Like It”!! Rehearsals would begin in Winnipeg March 2^nd!

Then, Pat Swenson, the General Manager of KBPS Radio in Portland, called to ask if I would co-host the station’s Pledge Week in February with Dick Estell. That name probably doesn’t mean a lot to folks, but in the world of Public Radio, he was god-like. He was known as The Radio Reader and would read books on air. This would be a great honour. (As it turned out, Dick got sick and couldn’t do the hosting duties which left me as sole host – more of that later).

Then, Norman Leyden got in touch to hire me to do our Irving Berlin concert with the Buffalo, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee Symphonies in the New Year.

Then SRO Head Bill Dobson got in touch to offer me three shows for the upcoming Summer in Portland.

Then, to maintain cash flow, I got a job at a phone answering service … on the graveyard shift.

Then, I got a show in New York at the 18^th Street Playhouse starting in January, a new piece called “I Only Just Got Here Myself”!!

Mercy! How did all this happen at the same time, and, most amazingly, fit together perfectly on my calendar??

The Buffalo concert happened just before rehearsals for the new piece began in New York. This was a special night because Mom and Dad and Gram came down from Montreal to see me sing. Also making the trek down was Norma Springford, my beloved theatre teacher from Sir George (whom I’ve mentioned in other postings). I’d not seen her in 14 years, but she looked just as I remembered her, small and frail but larger than life at the same time. This was a glorious experience on so many levels. The orchestra was spectacular and I think I sounded pretty good. Mom told me afterward that Dad had cried from the start of the show to the end. He would never let on that that had happened but I could see he was incredibly proud and I could feel it when he hugged me afterward. It ended all too soon and I was back in New York!

The 18^th Street Playhouse was located in a dilapidated commercial building in Chelsea (It’s now part of “The Flynn”, an upscale Condo complex.). The “theatre” had no fabled past but had been created in the seventies as yet another street level performance venue in lower Manhattan to provide cheap space for new and developing work. It was, in theatrical terms, a “Black Box”, a large, low-ceilinged room, every part of which (floor, ceiling, walls, windows, fixtures) had been painted black, with various areas sectioned off to act as dressing rooms for the actors and “facilities” for the audience. Primitive to say the least! But when I walked in on the first day of rehearsals, it was magical. The magic wore off very quickly.

“I Only Got Here Myself” was a new work by two New Yorkers centering around a boy about to be born who, with the assistance of a heavenly “guide” named ‘Bolt’ (as in “out of the blue”), gets a chance to see what his life would be like depending on the choices he makes. Yeah … well. The last line of the review in “Other Stages Weekly” was “’I Only Just Got Here Myself’ should be re-titled “Knowing When To Leave”, and that sort of summed up the experience.

I had auditioned for the show early in the New Year, had heard nothing back and had forgotten about it. But because the man they had cast as ‘Bolt’ had dropped out for a better opportunity, I got the part … the day before rehearsals were to begin! This was, again, a Waiver show and we rehearsed, for the most part, only in the evenings, so I didn’t have to make any work changes. But this addition to my life made for very long days! I would work Lincoln Center from 10:00am to 4:00pm, grab some food for dinner, rehearse from 6:00 to 11:00, dash uptown to the Answering Service, work from midnight to 7:00am, dash home, shower and be back at Lincoln Center at 10:00!!! Fortunately, there were rarely calls at the Service during the night, so I would sleep on the floor for a few hours. This was my life for my last two months in New York.

There were only five of us in the cast, and very late in the rehearsal period, we lost two members to “other work”. These were tense, tense times because the show was being written and re-written as we went along, new songs added then cut, dialogue added or cut constantly and with new people coming in, utter chaos reigned. My one constant was Tim Barber as “The Boy” (who is in the picture with me to the left) with whom I had all my scenes. We became very close (out of self preservation more than anything else) and would console each other at every opportunity. That kept us both on even keel despite the madness swirling around us.

There were, mercifully, no major mishaps during the three-week run. But audiences (and we were full every night!!) were baffled and bewildered as we trotted about trying to make some sense for them (and ourselves!) of what we were saying and singing. I would cringe when I saw friends in the house, but they were always sort of generous afterward. In New York, one understands the situation when you see new work being done and try to be as supportive as possible. Sometimes that was hard. The show closed on a good note, we dutifully said our goodbyes at a small closing party and that was it. New York was over and done with (for the moment) and I left the next day.

What really got me through those final weeks was the anticipation of what lay ahead, of getting back to the clear air of the West Coast and then into the exciting Unknown of the Manitoba Theatre Centre! Boy, I was ready!!!

 

 

ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT – Part Five

The intensity of the lead up to my departure from Portland was almost too much to process. While there was a great deal to do in preparation for leaving, there were still some performance and directorial obligations to attend to. There were media interviews of every stripe, farewell lunches and brunches and dinners and parties and it was hard not to get caught up in all the hype. It was exhausting and not a little bit sad!

Fortunately, I’d had the foresight to reserve myself some down time at a hotel in St. Thomas for a week before starting the new adventure in New York. The contrast between the whirlwind of the final weeks in Portland and the stillness and calm of the Shibui Resort high above Charlotte Amalie was shocking and it took some adjustment. I still felt the buzz of all the departure craziness and was wracked for the first few days with homesickness. But there was no turning back.

I hit the ground running in New York. A friend had offered a room in his apartment in Inwood, a neighbourhood about as far as you can get from the mid-town action, up at 207th Street at the very end of the A Train line! But those long subway rides gave me time to adjust to a new way of doing just about everything in my life! The Portland Community had sent me off with a large financial gift from the Roast and my first order of business was to see as many shows as I could and to start auditioning. The former was easy (all I can say is thank God for the “half price” TKTS booth in Times Square – back in those days, it was a series of small joined sheds with grumpy guys cramped inside yelling back and forth to each other for what was available when you walked up to their windows; there was something very theatrical about the whole experience in itself). The latter, not so much.

What can be said about New York that hasn’t been said by just about everyone else already? What sticks in my mind most of all was the smell. I had arrived in mid-fall, when the air was getting crisp and the aroma of scorched pretzels from the street carts permeated midtown. Combined with the smell of electricity and a hint of stale urine from the subway air vents in the sidewalks, those smells grounded the city’s identity in the very core of my being and wrapped me, gradually, in a familiar and comforting hug each day.

In the first weeks, I saw a show every day, two on matinee days, and became very familiar with the Theatre District and environs. I can still feel the utter thrill of entering the tiny lobbies of those hallowed buildings, smelling the atmosphere, climbing the stairs to the balcony (which was usually where the half price tickets were) and privately wrapping myself in my profession. Show after show amazed and enthralled me. I was in Show Biz Mecca and it was everything I had hoped it would be. At least, from the front of the house.

Getting auditions was another thing altogether. It was hard! I haunted the Equity Audition Center daily, checking out the Broadway postings and making appointments. I auditioned for Austin Pendelton’s production of “The Little Foxes” with Elizabeth Taylor to no avail. I auditioned for high-end workshops of new plays, again to no avail. The supply and demand ratio was so out of whack but I knew that would be the case even before leaving Portland.

As time went on, I learned some of the ropes and managed to get myself “on the line” a number of times. Turning up at a theatre Stage Door at the crack of dawn to get a low audition number became routine. A low number is important! When there are seven hundred people trying out for five or six ensemble replacements it becomes a case of not wasting a whole day standing freezing on the street until they called your number or, mercifully sometimes, sitting in the semi-warm lobby of a theatre to get seen. A few times, I got close. But more often than not, word would circulate quickly that they were “typing out”. “Typing out” meant that only people who fit, to us, unknown visual criteria (height, weight, colouring, ethnicity) were allowed to audition. Groups of twenty or thirty were herded down to the theatre basement and lined up. A low level stage management grunt would walk up and down the line, look you over, make a note on a clip board, and then call out the numbers of those “suitable”, at least in their view, to go upstairs into the backstage area and wait to be heard. The whole demeaning process took about ninety seconds and you were back out on the street. Unless your number was called!

My big “close” was for the first National Tour of “Sweeny Todd”. It was at the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin). There was no typing-out and this was a lobby wait, so we were nice and warm by the time we got to go backstage. Nerves are an odd thing. When you don’t really know what to expect they tend to be somewhere way in the background, so, in a sense, ignorance is bliss. I had positioned myself close to one of the lobby doors into the theatre and would surreptitiously open it just a sliver to see what was going on when none of the patrolling stage management grunts were nearby.

The house was dark and the stage was lit. There was an old upright piano at left, just like in the movies!! An auditioner would come out, give their music to the pianist with an instruction or two, say their name, sing the requested sixteen bars and be told “thank you” from a voice in the dark (who, in this case, was Joanna Merlin, Harold Prince’s Casting Director) and leave. This happened over and over. It was hard to hear the voices with the door so minimally ajar, so I had no way of judging what the response was being based on. (Coincidentally, I’d sung for Hal Prince a few months earlier at a Lecture-Dem hosted by St. Mary’s Academy in Portland. He had some nice things to say about me at the time, but, of course, I couldn’t trade on that at this audition, could I?)

After a couple of hours, my group number was called and we were guided backstage and put in line to be heard. A number was called out and each would follow the routine I’d seen from the lobby door. The line was moving pretty fast as guy after guy walked on stage, got a “thank you” and exited. Some didn’t even get to finish the sixteen bars. I thought this was just another day wasted.

Because “Sweeny Todd” requires legit voices for the ensemble, I’d had decided to sing “Her Face” from “Carnival”. It’s beautiful melody soars nicely, shows some range, and I was very comfortable with it. I walked out into the immense space and over to the pianist. He was very pleasant to me and since the sixteen bar section was pretty straightforward he nodded and said I could go to center stage and start. Two bar intro and I was into the song. Part of me was paying attention to the singing; in fact, I was luxuriating in it because the incredible accompanist was gloriously expanding the sheet music and making the piano sound like an orchestra. But the other part of me was straining to hear that “thank you” that had stopped so many before me. I kept singing! The sixteen bars I’d chosen came and went and I just kept singing … all the way to the end. Silence. I looked over at the accompanist and he raised his eyebrows and smiled just a little bit. The silence went on for a long time, a very long time. I supposed that people were conferring out there in the dark but I could hear nothing. Then it came. “Thank you very much” and it was over.

Time seemed to have suspended itself as I walked off the stage. The memory is indelible. I remember the accompanist handing me back my music, smiling at me as he said “good luck to you” and then being lost in the backstage dark again walking toward the exit. It was that long, long silence after I’d sung that held so much beautifully intense promise. I didn’t want to let it go. I wasn’t upset or angry. I was euphoric! To have gotten that close was enough of a validation for me. I was viscerally satisfied that I’d made those folks in the Broadway Theatre dark stop and talk about me if only for a minute or so. The air was cold outside, but it didn’t matter. This was where I was meant to be! Mind, it could have been that in all that silence those folks were only giving their lunch orders to stage management! I chose to think that wasn’t the case.

Then, two things happened at the same time.

I had decided to lower my sights since Broadway wasn’t welcoming me with open arms. (That wasn’t to happen until a few years later (twice) and via an unexpected and completely different route – but more of that in another posting.) I went out for the annual Trinity Players production of “A Christmas Carol” and was cast as ‘Bob Cratchit’. Trinity Players operated under the “Equity 99-seat Waiver Contract” (a contract that has since disappeared at American Equity) which allowed a company to hire Equity actors for little (VERY little) or no pay. I got “a little”, mainly to cover transportation (subway) but I was in a show!!! And then, the other thing.

Part of my plan was to see a new place or take a tour of a building or city neighbourhood each day. Lincoln Center was high on that list and one afternoon I headed up there and bought a tour of the three main buildings of the complex – Met Opera, City Ballet and NY Phil. There were about 20 people on this tour (many of them Japanese who understood little or no English) and was led by a rather stylish older woman who obviously knew the material thoroughly and had, for want of a better term, a rather distinctive “New Yawk accent”. Her name was Peggy Kaufmann (just behind me in the pic to the left here with some of The Guides). She was somewhat glib and very funny and, because I was asking way too many questions and few of the other people in the group understood what she was talking about, she started to gravitate toward me and shape the tour to my questions. After it was over, we walked back toward the Met building and I asked her if they had any volunteer tour guide positions open. “Volunteer, hell! You get paid to do this, honey”. And that began my life at “LC”.

Ethel Weinstein ran the Tours. Thank God she took a shine to me (maybe too much of one, now that I think about it) because she was the definition of the word “battleaxe”. She must have been in her sixties. Thin and wiry with large glasses perched on her nose and a cigarette always dangling from the corner of her mouth, she epitomized an old school no-nonsense New York office manager. I hate to keep writing “New York” as a descriptor, but you couldn’t find these folks anywhere else!

The Tour of all the buildings was pretty detailed. It took a while to learn and memorize it, and, as I did, I would wander freely though the buildings making sure I knew everything about the art and sculpture, the architecture and history of the build. Never one to make it easy on myself, I would search out details and stories that no one else was including in their Tours (there were a lot of guides) and personalized it from my own performance experiences. It brought my tour to life and I couldn’t wait to get to work each day.

While that was happening during the day, I was rehearsing “A Christmas Carol” with Trinity Players at night. The one sad thing about Waiver shows was that if someone got a better (or paying) job somewhere else they would just disappear! I would come in to rehearsals to find a new ‘Mrs. Cratchit’ sitting across from me or a new ‘Mr. Fezziwig’ frantically learning dance steps in the corner with the choreographer. And the Chorus parts? Don’t get me started. There was always an Ensemble vocal rehearsal going on somewhere in the building! Having come from a highly disciplined approach to putting on a production, this New York way of doing things, at least on this level, surprised, saddened and angered me. But it was just the nature of the beast. Everyone was trying to make their way and these little shows were just for biding your time until something that would give you a leg up came along. Everyone accepted the fact (even the Union) and dealt with it and no one thought any worse of someone for leaving the production.

And as the year drew to a close, this is where I was – working in New York, IN the theatres (Lincoln Center) and IN the Theatre. But, to tell the truth, down deep, this didn’t feel right for me. Oh, I told myself that I was where I’d always wanted to be and I was earning a living of sorts. I had made some good friends and seen a lot of great work, but the harsh reality of actually living in “the City” was getting depressing. What was going to happen? And when? Fortunately, some wonderful opportunities were about to present themselves!

You never know what you’re in the middle of until you’re out of that middle and into the middle of something else … and perhaps not even then. From this distant vantage point I can see that, and while I was happy to have a LOT of work for a long time during those Portland days, I never luxuriated in it as I do these days. One thing led to another which led to another and on and on for years and as my life moved forward I accumulated vast amounts of experience and understanding without really knowing it was happening. I guess it was subliminal knowledge, nestling somewhere deep inside me and bit by bit percolating to the surface of its own accord whenever I happened to need it. But there were obvious lessons that brought me up short from time to time.

I was at the point in my Portland time when I rarely had to audition for shows. I had a reputation of being a “go-to” for character parts (although a “romantic lead” would pop up every now and then – ‘Tommy’ In “Brigadoon”,  ‘Billy Crocker’ in “Anything Goes”, etc.) – and my joy was in doing those roles that made audiences laugh. ‘Fancourt Babberly’ in “Charlie’s Aunt” (picture at right) and ‘Jerry’ in “Sugar” (the musical version of “Some Like It Hot”) come to mind. A guy in drag on stage has always been a surefire way to get the folks sitting in the dark to respond and those two roles were exactly that. Not that I felt “comfortable” wearing a dress but to hear sustained laughter because of something you did or a reaction you had sure was fulfilling.

I remember doing a dance sequence in “Sugar” opposite the late Gerry Morgan, a wonderful older character actor, who was playing my “love interest” (the Joe E. Brown role in the movie). My costume for this dance was a vast hoop skirt and, as part of the choreographed evading of the unwanted advances of Gerry’s character, I had managed, unseen, to hide a chair under the skirt. When I revealed the chair, brandishing it as a barrier to him getting any closer to me at the climax of the number, the audience went nuts. I had never heard that kind of response for something I had done on stage. It went on and on getting louder and louder as Gerry and I held our positions in the stand-off, looking at each other, trying not to lose it ourselves.

I’ve never forgotten that sound. It was a reaction to something which, while calculated and heavily prepared, had become a reality everyone had bought into. On one level it was academic, a case of action, timing and response. But on another level, it resulted in a collective suspension of disbelief and genuine surprise. The sequence can be repeated night after night but is never exactly the same each time. There are times in the Theatre when everything you’ve thought about and rehearsed for days and days combines with the ephemeral psyche of a particular audience dynamic that aligns in just the right way to produce a transcendent moment. But it can’t be manufactured. You have no idea how to recreate it because the audience is the nightly unknown. The “Magic” of The Theatre!

But I digress … a little. Understanding the crafting of Theatre is one thing. Understanding the crafting of Self is something else altogether.

Jack Booch was a Director who had been head of the Theatre Guild in New York and had come to Portland via Los Angeles. He was a diminutive, frantic man who did not suffer fools lightly and always “spoke his mind”, to put it mildly. His tirades were legendary and he had a reputation of, at times, reducing actors to tears – not something that would be tolerated these days. But, at the same time, he was incredibly affable, viciously funny and he did his job very well.

I was cast in the role of ‘Jacques Bonnard’ in Kander and Ebb’s wonderful musical, “The Happy Time”. Ironically, the character is French Canadian (I was born in Montreal) and, needless to say, my accent was impeccable. The role had originally been played by legit baritone Robert Goulet on Broadway so I had a lot going for me, and to top it off, Jack liked me. I look at that picture of me (and that’s my real hair with a bit of a perm) and flash back to the opening number when ‘Jacques’ sings the title song, inviting the audience to enter into the memory with him that forms the basis of the show. I would always (always!) have to control the lump that formed in my throat as the words and music conjured up a sense memory of my youth in Montreal. It would overwhelm me at every performance. Reprising that song at the end of the show would sometimes reduce me to tears. The show sold out night after night and it truly was a happy time. It would be three years later that I would again work with Jack in another Robert Goulet role. Any guesses?

By the mid and late seventies I was totally immersed (and I mean TOTALLY) in The Theatre. I was performing, directing, teaching, running the school, doing radio, television, writing for kids and lived, slept, breathed and ate theatre. Unfortunately, few relationships succumbed to this all-consuming involvement but I honestly couldn’t help myself. The acting and singing roles piled on top of each other as did the directing assignments and the sense of accomplishment and clarity of purpose satisfied every fibre of my being. Directing highlights include two productions of “Godspell”, two productions of “Jacques Brel”, two productions of a staged version of Handel’s “Messiah” with the wonderful Vera Long as my musical director and co-creator (and if you don’t think that packed the houses, you’d be wrong – one of the review headlines read “Hallelujah, a new ‘Messiah’) and a long list of big book musicals.

From time to time, I was asked to work some fundraisers or speak to some civic group and that was always rewarding. But, by far, my favourites were the fundraisers with the Oregon Symphony! I was used to singing with pit orchestras for musicals or with small bands for cabarets and clubs. But singing with a Symphony Orchestra is like nothing else. There is no room for error. Sixty-three musicians don’t “vamp till ready”. As I learned very quickly and very early in my concert career, you come in when you’re supposed to come in!!

Norman Leyden was a world-class clarinetist and arranger who had worked with Glen Miller during the war years and had recorded with everyone from Sarah Vaughn to Tony Bennett and Harry James and had eventually been appointed as Associate Conductor of the Oregon Symphony. He was also the “POPS” conductor and doing those various fundraisers was how we met. To top it all off, he was really classy and a really nice guy!

Because I could switch between a legit sound and crooning, he decided I fit the bill for concerts featuring music from the old radio show “Your Hit Parade” or of individual theatre composers like Richard Rogers, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. My partner in these concerts was invariably the great Ardyth Shapiro, a tiny, vivacious, silky smooth mezzo who could do the same thing I did vocally. We covered ALL the bases! We’d perform in Portland and then take the concert up the road to the Seattle Symphony for a couple more performances. Norman’s incredible arrangements had been created specifically for Ardy and I and it was all very heady.

But it was our Irving Berlin program that “got legs” and took us all around the U.S. over a two year period! Whenever I heard Norman’s voice on the phone, I knew we had another date – San Francisco, Denver, Baltimore, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Buffalo (put the word “symphony” after each of those cities) and on and on. We’d arrive in the new city, get settled into the hotel, have a bite to eat and head out for the single afternoon rehearsal with the orchestra. Norman’s arrangements were so inventive. His arrangement for Berlin’s “Isn’t This A Lovely Day” began with a huge “storm” for the orchestra before settling into a lush string bed as I sang “The weather is frightening, the thunder and lightning seem to be having their way”. It was so musically perfect and set up the lyrics on every level. I miss Norman. He passed a few years ago at the age of 96, amazingly conducting his own 90th birthday celebration with the Oregon Symphony and actually made his “debut” with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony playing his clarinet at 95! I can only hope!

In between all this orchestra activity, I found myself in Seattle once again, this time at The Cirque Dinner Theatre, again with Jack Booch and again playing a Robert Goulet role – ‘Lancelot’ in “Camelot”. I was really nervous about this one as I would be playing opposite one of my all-time idols, Howard Keel (Google him if you don’t know who he was)!! By this time, Howard was 60 years old but still going strong (he was on a bit of a hiatus from “Dallas” and this was a favour for Booch whom he’d known for a long time). On the days off during rehearsals and the run of the show, I would drive the two hours back to Portland to take care of business and end up watch tapes of his great movies – “Show Boat”, “Kiss Me, Kate”, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” – and have to pinch myself to realize that I was staring into this mega-star’s eyes every day! It wasn’t a dream!

Howard was a huge man! He was 6’3” with immense shoulders and a barrel chest (the perspective in this photo from the show is a bit wonky … he wasn’t THAT big). He could be intimidating by just standing still. But we hit it off a few days after beginning rehearsals. I was sweating bullets as I got up in front of the cast to sing “If Ever I Would Leave You”, the iconic song from the show. I knew Howard had sung it many times before in concert, on TV and recordings, and there he was, sitting with Jack, waiting. I launched in and because we’d rehearsed the scene leading up to it with our ‘Guinevere’ (Darlene Anders), I had a grounding of “where” the song was coming from in the character and the folks sitting in the rehearsal room simply disappeared. This wasn’t an audition but rather a confirmation that I should be playing the part. It went off pretty well and they all applauded at the end of it. “Whew”, I thought to myself. Howard got up and came over to me during the break, put his hand on my shoulder and said “That was wonderful” and walked away.

In the days to come as rehearsals got more intense and we became more comfortable with each other, our chats turned to our journeys (his great and long, mine not so much). At one point I began to talk about feeling inadequate because I’m so short (I’m 5’7”). His face darkened. There’s no other way to put it. “Don’t ever say that again!” he shouted at me. “You have a great voice and you act well. Your height has nothing to do with that and never should. So you just change that attitude right now!” and he left the room. Jack, who was sitting at the table just looked at me with a slight smile and raised his eye brows. “Any questions?” That was a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Ironically, a few years later I was auditioning for an agent in New York. After I’d sung a few songs for her, she looked at me and said “You’ve got a six-foot-three voice caught in a five-foot-seven frame. You’re going to be a hard sell”. I didn’t go with that or any other agent.

I’ve chosen the path that Howard set for me. That lesson of being who I am and how I am has never left me both in the Theatre and in Life, and if that doesn’t suit someone, it’s their problem, not mine.

The year and a half that followed was filled with more acting and directing assignments, but something deep inside was niggling at me. There was a sense of complacency settling in (which now, from this perspective, seems to me to be insane – why would anyone give up this total and fulfilling immersion) and I felt there might be other opportunities elsewhere, namely, New York. I don’t know, even now, if this was ego or anxiety. When I talked it over with Isabella, she told me that I should follow my heart but also complicated my decision by saying that she hoped I knew that she had been grooming me to take over the Theatre after she retired. But I decided to leave anyway.

The community threw a “Roast” as a farewell. I still have a tape of that love-filled evening and have watched it a couple of time since that long ago event. Mercy, that was a wonderful time! But my sights were trained on the future and what it had to hold. Ah, the illogic of youth!

NEXT: New York, New York!

If Vancouver gave me some confidence in myself as a performer, Portland, Oregon confirmed and validated my abilities beyond my wildest imaginings! At the time of course I had no idea what I was heading into in the Spring of 1972, but remembering it now, 45 years later in preparation for these writings, I’m still overwhelmed and amazed by the breadth and scope of what I learned, achieved and passed on during my nine years there.

The Hoyt Hotel was pretty massive. It took up an entire city block opposite the train station. The area was somewhat sketchy, but the Hoyt was an tiny oasis, a classy hotel that had a broad reputation for its theatrical, quirky décor. It was a Mecca for the late night “demimonde” with a great restaurant open 24-hours a day and where, as it turned out, most of the city’s performers came to eat and drink after their shows. That was to prove invaluable in the time ahead.

Part of my contract arrangement included a room on the hotel’s top floor. I settled in quickly and we were off to the races! Rehearsals with the 16-person cast in 500-seat “The Roaring Twenties” Show Room were fast and furious. Jack Card liked it that way. The raised stage, which was huge and acted as a dance floor for the audience when it was in the house level position, accommodated us all nicely. This was a big production and called “What A Night” and was described by one of the reviewers as “the type of entertainment that’s disappearing from just about every place in the country except Las Vegas and Portland”. We were compared to “the big time” and lauded as “Class A show folk”! The show was great! It truly was. We played twice a night and three times on Saturday to packed houses and were, literally, the toast of the town. We toddled along for five months and then disaster struck.

Harvey Dick, the fatherly and flamboyant owner who watched over us like his own kids, had become embroiled in a lawsuit and began to close down the hotel, bit by bit.  Of course, the first thing to go was the showroom. My contract was for another two months and I had no place to work. Fortunately, Harvey had taken a liking to me and decided that I should do a feature act in the hotel Lounge. It was called “The Barbary Coast”, an incredible elongated space, one wall of which was taken up with an immense 40-foot long bar, and the other lined with functioning coin operated player pianos!! I sang nightly sets with a trio. All my friends from the show had gone on to other things and I was all by myself, bravely warbling for sparser and sparser crowds as the hotel wound down. But at least I had a job.

Very early one morning, there was a knock at my door. One of the guys from the trio, who was also staying in the hotel, was standing there in his dressing gown and babbling that we had to get out because they were closing down the hotel … now! RIGHT NOW! There are times when your mind simply won’t accept a huge piece of information and you find yourself unable to process words or thoughts. This was one of those moments. What do I do … NOW?

Over the months of eating in the restaurant, I had met and become friends with a LOT of Portland’s performers who, over a meal, were always on my case to audition for shows. A few calls later and I had found a place to crash until I could figure out something more permanent. I arranged some auditions, stuffed a suitcase with my sparse wardrobe and blindly stepped into a nine-year journey that would firmly establish me as a force to be reckoned with in the Great Pacific Northwest of the good old US of A!

The guiding light of Portland Civic Theatre (or “Theater” as the Yankees spell it) was Isabella Chappell. I don’t use the word “doyenne” very often, but that’s what she was, a dynamo with boundless energy, generosity and wisdom. She had already been running the theatre for a number of years when I arrived in her world, unannounced and without fanfare, and, as it happened, she took a shine to me and I became, for want of a better phrase and the chagrin of some other male performers in town, her “golden boy”.  I landed ‘Lucky’ in “Dames At Sea” in the late Fall of 1972, quickly followed by ‘C.C. Baxter’ in “Promises, Promises” and then the Inaugural season (1973) of “SRO at PCT”, a Summer Repertory company of 20 performers under the direction of Bill Dobson, Gene Davis Buck and Glenn Gauer. How I came to be so fortunate is beyond me, but I thought I had died and gone to heaven! In the period of a year, I had played more leading men than perhaps I deserved (adding ‘Bobby’ in “Boy Friend” and ‘Hero’ in “Forum” with SRO) and that was only the beginning. The intensity of this period is now only a visceral memory but I know that without those initial all-encompassing experiences I wouldn’t have had the grounding for the time that lay before me. The SRO Company experiences prepared me for the Company days at the Manitoba Theatre Centre years later, when trust and loyalty were the foundation of producing excellence and quality on stage. I am still friends with many of those folks from 45 years ago (thank goodness for Facebook) and we are connected through those halcyon days.

Then came “Cabaret”. I don’t want this post to turn into a “then-I-did” litany but I had to stop here for a moment. It hadn’t been all that long since Joel Grey had taken Broadway with his archetypal portrayal of the ‘MC’ in that Kander and Ebb masterpiece. Our production was being directed by a man named Jim Erickson, a high school drama teacher who had a huge reputation in Portland for incredibly extravagant visual productions without much attention being paid to the substance of a piece. But there was no escaping the “substance” of “Cabaret” and despite some set-to episodes between Jim and I, we managed to get this beautiful bugger on stage and it ended up being one of my most satisfying (and terrifying) theatrical experiences.

Opening night was fraught with the complicated and primitive stage machinery moving sets back and forth, and the visual effects seemed to have a life of their own despite having been practiced and practiced in the on-stage rehearsals before opening. The last image the audience was to be left with was of a swastika painted on a huge drop spanning the entire width of the stage instantly unfurling behind me as I whispered the final “Goodnight”. I took my final pose on a raised platform just inches in front of where the drop was to fall. I said the word. There as a moment of silence. I heard the drop start to come down and felt the “whoosh” of the steel batten at the bottom of the drop as it “kissed” the back of my head and smashed into the platform at the very end of the heel of my shoe. At the same time there was a snap blackout (the lights, not me), a momentary hush and the audience erupted in applause. The effect had worked spectacularly but I could see people rushing into the wings because no one could tell if I’d been hit. Just like in the movies, I could see our Producer, Isabella, shoving her way through the crowd of stage hands and performers yelling “Is he alright, is he alright!!??”  Needless to say, I was repositioned on the platform and the drop was “lowered quickly” in subsequent performances. Heady stuff!

Then followed in quick and constant succession (and I promised I wouldn’t do this but … meh) my directing forays with “Feiffer’s People”, “The Unexpected Guest”, “Jacques Brel” and the first of two productions of “Godspell”, and on stage again as ‘Finch’ (above) in “How To Succeed” and ‘Bobby’ in “Company” (a role that still ranks as one of my all-time favorites!) and a LOT of others.

It was about this time that I started “teaching”. Presumptuous? Perhaps. But it actually wasn’t my call. Over the years leading up to the question Isabella asked me one afternoon (“Have you ever thought about giving some classes?”) my focus had always been on learning the lines, developing the character and keeping my head above water in the sea of information and confusion that comprised rehearsals and performances. I guess the assimilation of “technique” was subliminal and I was constantly discovering what, for me, worked or didn’t in terms of preparation and presentation. The objective eye had been honed in a very subjective environment and trying to balance the two usually resulted in something that was considered and comfortable. I had imposed on myself an approach based in a lot of thinking about what I was actually doing, making it as personal as possible (not getting too “Uta Hagan-ish” about it – a method that never worked for me, I discovered) but always aware that communicating with my fellow actors and the people sitting in the dark was the most important part of my job. I tentatively told Isabella that I was perhaps interested and the word went out that I was to teach an acting class for adults.

At that time, the Portland Civic Theatre School had been neglected over the years to the point that there was only a single dance class and a Saturday morning class for kids, total enrollment of about 20 people. By the time I left eight years later, the School, which, eventually, I was put in charge of, had grown to 40 yearly classes and an annual enrollment of almost 1,000 students, young and old. But that first day of my first class was the first time I’d ever stepped in front of a group of people (15 in this case) to tell them what I had learned and was still learning.

The night before the class, there had been a big storm and the leaky roof of the building had produced large puddles of water on the floor of the small studio I’d been assigned. I arrived early and there was the elegant Isabella, on her hands and knees, with sopping towels trying to clean up the water. It’s an image that has stayed with me and summed up this incredible woman’s devotion to the cause. The class was attentive as I described what I thought we should deal with over the weeks to come and everything just mushroomed from there. Classes in Musical Theatre (natch!) were added, in various Acting approaches, in Tap and Ballet and Jazz, Master Classes for Advanced Adults as well as for the kids who were tugging at the bit to get on stage (and there were a LOT of them). We started adding productions for the youngsters to perform in and that grew into a full-fledged season of “Junior Civic Theatre”. The teenagers who rose to the top of the heap in those Master Classes are still in the biz today and scattered all over the place and I’m still in touch with them! THAT amazes me. But what amazed me even more was the fundamental personal satisfaction I found in teaching. To see someone come to an understanding, grasp a particular element of performance and run with it because of something I’d said or a direction in which I’d urged them is incredibly fulfilling. I guess every teacher feels this way, but it was something I didn’t know I could do. I will always be grateful for Isabella’s question all those years ago.

So, the combination of performing and teaching filled my days and nights to overflowing. The totality of theatre life fed my soul and was really self-perpetuating. But just when you think you can’t add another thing to the breathless mix you’re already experiencing, another opportunity presents itself and you can’t resist. That opportunity came in the form of “KBPS Radio Theatre”. I can gloss over the advent of this project, but suffice to say that it was the result of another casual conversation with another dynamic Portland “doyenne”.  This time it was Dr. Patricia Swenson, an Educational Communications Director on the Board of National Public Radio (NPR) and a rabid advocate for educational radio. Aside from my voicing any number of characters in educational programs for very young kids, we evolved a program of radio dramas broadcast on Sunday evenings and at various times during the week. They were half-hour adaptations of any script I could find (some of the longer ones done as mini-series over a few weeks) and employed local actors who got a quick education (as did I) about acting on the radio – a technique that had been long lost when that art form (and it WAS an art form) began to quickly fade with the advent of television. For three years we filled the air waves with comedy, drama, history and aural travelogues and even won national awards for which I got to travel to Washington and the National Press Club to receive.

And I stop here for a moment (there’s still more to come about Portland) to offer a word of advice, especially to my younger reader. When you’re in the middle of experiencing something, do something to remember it! The hard thing about that is that you usually don’t KNOW you’re experiencing something special. In the moment, it probably just seems to be the way life is going and you’re involvement is nothing to note. But it IS something to note! With the help of those Journals and scrapbooks I kept over the years, I can now conjure up the past with the flip of a page and my history becomes a lesson to myself in the present. Make an effort to remember! Perhaps write it down or speak into a recording device, just a note or two to file away about why and how something is happening to you. It’s your history. The value in those memories will present itself when you least expect it.

(UP Next: The Symphony and Decisions)