kip/bot/blog

Cool article in today’s NYT about Mandy Patinkin taking on the role of Prospero in The Tempest. Patinkin is up there with Gary Oldman as my most admired/envied performance polymaths — he does music (which I’m not crazy about but respect), TV, film, stage and ranges from comedy to tragedy to Shakespeare. (Gary Oldman played the beginning of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto while filming Immortal Beloved, no hand double, it was him, with the LSO.)

Anyway, some interesting observations about the craft of acting:

Mr. Kulick and Ms. Tichler were “tirelessly campaigning for me to come back to the theater,” Mr. Patinkin said. “They kept asking me to read things. I read ‘The Tempest’ several times, and I couldn’t really get it. I have to have Shakespeare translated into English I can understand.”

Memorizing the role, Mr. Patinkin said, was another challenge: “It took 10 weeks, three to four hours a day, walking all over the streets and in the park and the gym. Finally, I had the part of Prospero in my brain. And then I spent three months just walking around and thinking about it.”

Even for someone who’s been doing Shakespeare for over thirty years, a translator is still needed. Even for someone who has been doing TV, it can take six months to get into a character that has been around forever.