King Lear – The Show Must Go On

We settled into the Guild Theatre in the second half of our sixth season. Now we were preparing ourselves for a series of artistic triumphs. We had a company of actors who had in fact triumphed over any number of difficulties of scheduling, of performance (and rehearsal) space, of storage of set pieces, props, and costumes, and on and on. All our troubles were over.

If you’ve been following these blogs, you will have noticed we tend to brag a little; we have been writing about our successes, about what we have done well. Why wouldn’t we? As we prepared for our first show in our new theatre we had everything going for us. There was another theatre company that had fallen dormant; they hoped to revive, but until they did they asked us if we would mind storing a number of platforms they owned but had no place to store. You betcha, we said, and turned them into audience risers in the Guild. (That company never revived.) Then it got even better.

The facilities manager of Mackey Auditorium called us. Mackey was going to be remodeled and would have all new seats. Would we like some of the old seats? Guess what we answered.

So, we opened King Lear in a brand new theatre financed in part by a $20,000 line-item grant from the city; The audience sat in upholstered seats on risers that permitted excellent sight-lines. And it got even better still. One of our actors had just bought a number of lighting instruments dirt cheap from another company; they were selling them because it was impossible to focus them. We bought them from him—cheap. It turned out they could not be focused because they all had the wrong bulbs in them. So we bought the right bulbs (They cost more than the instruments).

What could possibly go wrong? Well, I was playing Lear. I did two performances, Friday and Saturday, of our opening weekend. And then I had a heart attack. That sort of limited my ability to continue in the role. So, what to do? We could have simply decided that our run was over. Yes, we would have lost the expected income from some half-dozen scheduled performances, but there were no future costs. The Guild would not have charged us for the scheduled nights we would skip. We could have survived to do our next show. Perhaps.

But: “The show must go on.” That’s not just a slogan. For us it is pretty nearly a religious commandment. So, the director, Joan Kuder Bell, found someone to replace me. She called Jack Crouch, who had been the chair of the department of speech and drama at CU and the founder of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and asked him if he would take on the part. His response was something like: “How do you say no to a request like that?” He carried a script, he wore a black suit, and he did the role. Whatever he lacked in preparation and rehearsal he made up in his really impressive stage presence and his understanding of the role and the play.

“How do you say no to a request like that?” In the 35 year history of The Upstart Crow we have had a half-dozen such occasions; times when an actor simply couldn’t do the role they were cast in. In every case we have asked someone else to take over the role, either just for tonight or for the rest of the run. No one has ever said no. We really are something like a cult.

I never saw Jack as Lear. I wasn’t out of bed till after the show closed but it must have worked: audiences were good, people liked the show. That was April. That summer the Shakespeare Festival did Lear with Dudley Knight, a famed Shakespearean actor, in the title role. And there was a party that summer that Knight, and Crouch, and I attended. Three actors who had played Lear within the last few months. Guess what we talked about. Has that ever happened before or since?