“Dear fellow, I know you’ve heard tattle, but don’t believe a word. I’m in top, fighting form. And I haven’t touched a drop in over a year.”—Actor Nicol Williamson, misleading playwright Paul Rudnick about his widely rumored misbehavior and all-around insanity, quoted in Paul Rudnick, “Personal History: I Hit Hamlet—Behind the Scenes at a Broadway Fiasco,” The New Yorker, Dec. 24, 2007
I think we can all guess what happens next—Paul Rudnick looks back at the table and notices “a brandy snifter, a wine bottle, and a beer mug, all of which had been recently emptied into Nicol.”
The unexpectedly painful—literally so—1991 collaboration between the playwright and the contemporary of fellow actor-hellraisers Burton, Harris, and O’Toole, I Hate Hamlet, was supposed to be a comedy, but staging it became a horror show. Reading Rudnick’s account of the proceedings, you almost want to grab him and yell, the way you might at one of the criminally stupid teens in Halloween and its increasingly formulaic ripoffs, “Run! Run for your life! Run now!”
Omnivorous reader that I am, I don’t always get around to reading everything I want. For years, I’ve clipped articles out of magazines and newspapers, promising myself to read them eventually. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
My rediscovery of Rudnick’s hilarious reminiscence came at an opportune point, giving me some much-needed chuckles at a time when I could use them. I’ve linked to the article in the hope that you, faithful reader, might also avail yourself of this humor-layaway plan.
“Crazy ain’t criminal,” Bob Bernhoft, one of Wesley Snipes’ attorneys, advised a jury during the actor’s trial on income-tax evasion charges. “If it were, half of Hollywood would be in prison.” The jurors evidently bought that concept, since they acquitted Snipes on felony charges, despite the fact that he paid no income tax on $38 million in income. (Don’t try the latter too-clever-by-half maneuver at home, folks.)
You can extend the range of the territory envisioned by Bernhoft across the continent to Broadway, and its essential truth remains. (Latest case in point: Megan Mullally’s self-destructive exit from the Roundabout’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart.) But Nicol Williamson—I’m not sure, outside of John Wilkes Booth, that you’re going to find a nuttier actor than this one.
Whenever film aficionados speak of George Cukor’s A Double Life—the 1947 drama that finally won the beloved matinee idol Ronald Colman a well-deserved Oscar—there’s a lingering feeling that its premise of an actor getting a wee bit too much into his role in Othello might be a tad…exaggerated.
Stuff and nonsense. The Bard represents a kind of Bermuda Triangle for the unwary actor—Hamlet, particularly so. Daniel Day-Lewis has concentrated on film rather than theater over the last two decades, especially after he walked off a National Theatre stage in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, convinced that, in place of the ghost of Hamlet's father, he was talking to his real father, Cecil Day-Lewis, who had been dead at that point for 17 years already.
But Williamson’s variety of madness leaves that far in its wake, like an ocean liner charging away from a huffing-and-puffing tugboat. And, no matter how intensely Winona Ryder, Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, or whatever other media-flavor-of-the-month might be covered, the British actor can regard them with a lofty disdain.
Theater fans will remember—admittedly, more and more vaguely, with the passage of the years—how Williamson, as the ghost of John Barrymore, in the attire of his most famous role, had literally stabbed co-star Evan Handler during swordplay.
Yet Rudnick’s retrospective will, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father might say, “harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,/ Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,” etc. with these other incidents:
* To get into the mood for the comedy’s séance scene, the cast held a real séance in Rudnick’s apartment—at the end of which the door opened a crack. Did “some cackling, chaos-seeking, heedless Barrymore imp” make an appearance, as Rudnick speculates? Well, do you have a better explanation for everything that happened afterward?
I think we can all guess what happens next—Paul Rudnick looks back at the table and notices “a brandy snifter, a wine bottle, and a beer mug, all of which had been recently emptied into Nicol.”
The unexpectedly painful—literally so—1991 collaboration between the playwright and the contemporary of fellow actor-hellraisers Burton, Harris, and O’Toole, I Hate Hamlet, was supposed to be a comedy, but staging it became a horror show. Reading Rudnick’s account of the proceedings, you almost want to grab him and yell, the way you might at one of the criminally stupid teens in Halloween and its increasingly formulaic ripoffs, “Run! Run for your life! Run now!”
Omnivorous reader that I am, I don’t always get around to reading everything I want. For years, I’ve clipped articles out of magazines and newspapers, promising myself to read them eventually. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
My rediscovery of Rudnick’s hilarious reminiscence came at an opportune point, giving me some much-needed chuckles at a time when I could use them. I’ve linked to the article in the hope that you, faithful reader, might also avail yourself of this humor-layaway plan.
“Crazy ain’t criminal,” Bob Bernhoft, one of Wesley Snipes’ attorneys, advised a jury during the actor’s trial on income-tax evasion charges. “If it were, half of Hollywood would be in prison.” The jurors evidently bought that concept, since they acquitted Snipes on felony charges, despite the fact that he paid no income tax on $38 million in income. (Don’t try the latter too-clever-by-half maneuver at home, folks.)
You can extend the range of the territory envisioned by Bernhoft across the continent to Broadway, and its essential truth remains. (Latest case in point: Megan Mullally’s self-destructive exit from the Roundabout’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart.) But Nicol Williamson—I’m not sure, outside of John Wilkes Booth, that you’re going to find a nuttier actor than this one.
Whenever film aficionados speak of George Cukor’s A Double Life—the 1947 drama that finally won the beloved matinee idol Ronald Colman a well-deserved Oscar—there’s a lingering feeling that its premise of an actor getting a wee bit too much into his role in Othello might be a tad…exaggerated.
Stuff and nonsense. The Bard represents a kind of Bermuda Triangle for the unwary actor—Hamlet, particularly so. Daniel Day-Lewis has concentrated on film rather than theater over the last two decades, especially after he walked off a National Theatre stage in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, convinced that, in place of the ghost of Hamlet's father, he was talking to his real father, Cecil Day-Lewis, who had been dead at that point for 17 years already.
But Williamson’s variety of madness leaves that far in its wake, like an ocean liner charging away from a huffing-and-puffing tugboat. And, no matter how intensely Winona Ryder, Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, or whatever other media-flavor-of-the-month might be covered, the British actor can regard them with a lofty disdain.
Theater fans will remember—admittedly, more and more vaguely, with the passage of the years—how Williamson, as the ghost of John Barrymore, in the attire of his most famous role, had literally stabbed co-star Evan Handler during swordplay.
Yet Rudnick’s retrospective will, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father might say, “harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,/ Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,” etc. with these other incidents:
* To get into the mood for the comedy’s séance scene, the cast held a real séance in Rudnick’s apartment—at the end of which the door opened a crack. Did “some cackling, chaos-seeking, heedless Barrymore imp” make an appearance, as Rudnick speculates? Well, do you have a better explanation for everything that happened afterward?
* The star allegedly propositioned the stage manager, then launched a campaign to get her fired.
* Williamson drove everyone insane with other inappropriate actions, this time affecting the performance-in-progress—e.g., sometimes offering audible advice to other actors while still onstage, other times slipping off when, as Barrymore’s ghost, he was supposed to be eavesdropping on the proceedings.
But one question has always troubled me: What on earth could have provoked to the incident that forced poor Handler from the show? I think I found the clue in one of Williamson’s brainstorms (delivered, of course, in a 3 am phone call to Rudnick): Why not eliminate Handler altogether and let Williamson handle his lines, too?
“Oh, I know just what you’re thinking,” Williamson tells the astonished Rudnick.“Of course I could play both parts easily, but Andrew [Handler’s character] is intended to be what, twenty-six years old? And you’re wondering, Will the audience accept me as twenty-six?”
But one question has always troubled me: What on earth could have provoked to the incident that forced poor Handler from the show? I think I found the clue in one of Williamson’s brainstorms (delivered, of course, in a 3 am phone call to Rudnick): Why not eliminate Handler altogether and let Williamson handle his lines, too?
“Oh, I know just what you’re thinking,” Williamson tells the astonished Rudnick.“Of course I could play both parts easily, but Andrew [Handler’s character] is intended to be what, twenty-six years old? And you’re wondering, Will the audience accept me as twenty-six?”
No comments:
Post a Comment