"All the world's a stage....." (As You Like It)

.....A couple or more years ago, I played Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady" here in the Huntington Lakes' Theatre of the Performing Arts, as it is proclaimed in a large stone sign down by the road leading in to our clubhouse--and again in huge letters over the doors to the theatre itself, which contains 600+ seats. We had an orchestra and the performance was highlighted by the fact that we did the show "in concert"; meaning that the actors were permitted to read from their scripts on stage. I was also the director of the show, and I think I did a pretty good job of that; however, I disappointed myself in my own performance. It was pretty mediocre, I thought. And I couldn't understand why until yesterday.

....Now, I had acted in the leading roles in several productions on our stage in past years.I was "...ruler of the Queens nahvy" in HMS Pinafore, Koko in the Mikado, my favorite show; I directed and played the lead in Pirates of Penzance, Tevye in Fiddler, Harold Hill in Music Man, and so on into the night. I felt pretty confident of my acting skills in those shows, calling on all the acting classes I had taken prior to these productions--both in college and here in Boca Raton with Val Chevron, an Equity member. And so I wondered what caused me to move about so clumsily and read my lines like a butcher...and I have nothing against butchers; they are meaty nice people.

.....We do have an acting class here every Thursday called "Theatre Workshop," and every month or so, the wannabe thespians put on some skits before an audience in the big ballroom--it's called "Showtime". There are more than 20 people in the class, and we/they/I have a lot of fun in the small TV room which is more intimate than the ballroom. Since I've been away from that class for more than six weeks, with a bum hip, I hadn't been able to keep up with what they were planning, nor did I have the opportunity to make suggestions for improving their skills (as the leader of the class asked me to do.) Well, during this Showtime, the "actors" are permitted to read from their scripts as we did in My Fair Lady, and to tell the truth, yesterday the performances were uniformly mediocre to poor to frightful. And so, I realized then why I floundered, flitted, and flopped around as Henry Higgins. Unless you are a professional Equity actor, amateurs are going to have a hard time and will tend to forget to ACT while reading scripts on stage. One forgets to project, to pronounce consonants clearly, to remember bodily movements called for, to touch on the nuances of the script. At this Showtime, most of the performers did not act their lines--they just depended on reading, forgetting everything in the lines that the skit called for.

.....If you're going to read lines while holding a script, and forget about ACTING, you might as well just duplicate the scripts and hand them out to the audience who can read for themselves. If I ever perform again, I will never hold another script in my hand. Yes,.....I know that the reason for reading lines from a script is done because most seniors, and even non-seniors have a hard time memorizing lines. Try doing "Trouble" from Music Man.