Thursday, 15 December 2022

Adulting

 
 Love Goddess - The Rita Hayworth Musical has another two weeks at the Cockpit, and I'm enjoying it more and more. Here's another lovely shot from Roswitha Chesher Also making me look good of course is the show's star and co-creator Almog Pail, who gave this fascinating interview in The Jewish Chronicle recently about one of the chief inspirations behind the show – as well as "one of Israel's founding fathers" – her own grandfather Meir Pa'il. During the second act I watch Almog sing the "Gilda"-inspired "I Don't Belong To You" from the theatre's gantry, in character as producer Harry Cohn. Just standing there, hoping to exude a kind of stony, middle-aged command, I realise is a quite familiar feeling to me: I've been playing these kind of characters since my late teens, and now I'm now genuinely middle-aged, yet can't be sure that I'm approaching this moment of onstage stillness any differently to how I might if I were still seveteen. I wonder if Orson Welles felt the same when he suddenly found himself the same age as characters he'd been playing for decades. They're not any easier to play now, but then they never seemed hard. They also never seemed nice. That's what's been going through my head when the lights are on me in the gantry. And when they're off I count the audience.
 

 Top row, left to right: My brother-in-law Tom, Dan Tetsell, my sister Susy, my sister Alice, and my nephew Jake. A beautiful turnout.

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