I have always been curious why someone who has a reputation as lone wolf would surround himself with children.
–Lex Luthor on Batman,
Superman/Batman #5.
I’ve wondered about posting a daylog for March, because I’ve experienced a lot of March: visiting my widowed mother who is afflicted with a variation of the same
disease that killed my father, attending my wife’s first fencing tournament, attending a party hosted by the university’s fencing team (four of us old people and a slew of twenty-somethings), deciding to attend a largish nodermeet, hearing a stunning and disturbing story about a Canadian Olympic athlete I vaguely know, meeting once more with Jeremy, preparing a complicated cancer fundraiser, spending a night drinking and bowling with Singularity Girl and a twenty-four-year-old helicopter pilot whom I directed, when he was a teen, in the original When Shadows Fall. And, of course, the revised and revamped play itself, Shadows. The problem? Many of the stories aren’t mine, and I don’t know how much I want to blog my life and the lives of people I know all over the web. Besides, the Olympic athlete story necessarily has the status of rumour, not fact.
One tale, however, had to be told:
Adam, who played Kevin, a central character in Shadows, became quite ill the week before the play. He remained determined he would be onstage, and actually came from the hospital, where he had just been hydrated on intravenous, to our dress rehearsal.
Unfortunately, he lacked a voice.
Desperate, I contacted Brian, who originated the part in 1998. He lives in Toronto now, and has since accumulated a fair bit of acting experience. He agreed, most enthusiastically. For the first two nights, Adam acted the very physical part but, through the miracle of modern technology, he spoke with Brian’s voice. The audience adjusted quickly, as Brian, up in the lighting booth, looked down and read from the script, which we’d e-mailed him earlier in the week, into a mic.
The first night was a little rougher than we hoped, though still pretty good. The cast needed time to adjust to the Kevin ventriloquism effect, voiced by someone most of them had just met that afternoon. And for some of my actors, it was their first time before a sizable audience. The rest of the run went significantly better, and Adam made a dramatic recover, speaking for himself by Saturday night.
I don’t know that anyone has handled this situation in quite this way before.
The show must go on.
Final note: Much mirth had been made because Adam's full name sounds very close to Adam West, the actor who played Batman in the campy 1960s show, which the kids still know. His efforts on behalf of the show suggested a different superhero, however, so on closing night, we presented him with a customized Superboy figure, with black leather jacket and Adam's curly blonde locks.
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