From the King (Blog #11)October 29th 2007 |
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POGUE HAMLET BLOG #11
Another weekend down. The shows were all solid and performances are being maintained throughout. Of course, each of us has our occasional muffed line, but nothing out of the ordinary from any usual run. I still manage to find bits of business, a look or reaction or a line-reading and go, “I wish I’d had that on opening night.” But that is also par for the course…the performance continues to grow. It’s the one lament I have about performing only on weekends and for just a month. By the time you’ve made all these discoveries, you never get a chance to settle in with them because the run is over.
But then I was never one for long runs either. After six weeks-two months, I’m always ready to press on to something new. I toured in a few dinner theatre shows which got very tedious…i.e. Martha Raye and her “planned break-ups”. Planned break-ups were where you pretended something went wrong onstage and all the actors deliberately broke character and laughed themselves silly, much to the delight of the audience. In the case of Ms. Raye, I and another actor pretended to lift her onto a table where she supposedly sat on a tin can. She proceeded to go through an array of grimaces and slightly risqué, nudge-nudge, wink-wink bits that supposedly broke-up her fellow actors. It was, I suppose, a fairly interesting acting exercise…to make such phony fits of laughter believable, still…The only thing that saved me in the six month run of that show was that I graduated up to a bigger role the production.
We are, of course, actually doing four performances a week, as we have a school matinee every Thursday. The first one seemed to go off without a hitch, the students seemed attentive. I’d actually like to do a Q & A with the students after to get their reaction.
Our company is amiable, easy, and very professional. Jack Parrish, a delight to act with and to just to watch act, has also become good company backstage. Being roughly the same age, we share common experiences and concerns about theatre. Our conversations range from how to make Lexington…a city with certainly the right demographic and population…a professional theatre town (naturally, a concern for us…both being Equity) to just old war stories. Jack actually mentioned a dinner theatre he had played in Manassas, Virginia, the other night and I went, “My God! My play WHODUNNIT, DARLING? (which had premiered at Studio Players) had a successful run there.” From somewhere out of the mists of memory emerged the director’s name and it rang a bell for Jack. So I’ve now culled through one of my treasure trove files and found a program from the play to show him. He and I are probably the only two in the cast old enough to remember dinner theatre’s glory days and steamboat rounds of roast beef. For all their faults and bad plays, dinner theatres were in their own unique way wonderful things and kept a lot of actors employed at the time. More anon.
Charles Edward Pogue
“Claudius”
Mr. Pogue expresses his own individual, personal opinions and they in no way reflect the opinions and policies of AGL or any other organization.
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