Patrick Stewart's pre-Broadway stop later this month in Salt Lake City with his one-man "A Christmas Carol" presentation won't be your typical bus-and-truck company tour.
Maybe one minivan or a station wagon or just a pickup truck would suffice.Most road tours (such as "Cats," which ends its one-week visit today at the Capitol Theatre) have carefully mapped-out itineraries, calculating the shortest distances between the various cities.
But when you don't need hundreds of costumes and a convoy of semi-trucks for props and scenery, the most efficient Point A to Point B routing no longer becomes Priority No. 1.
Stewart, a Shakespearean-trained actor who's known to millions of avid fans as the Starship Enterprise's Captain Jean-Luc Picard on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," is visiting a quartet of cities on four consecutive weekends prior to his two-week mid-December "Dickens" stint on Broadway.
The pre-Broadway tour will stop first in Santa Barbara, Calif., then Salt Lake City, followed by Anchorage, Alaska, and Pasadena, Calif.
I talked briefly with Stewart this past week by phone in his trailer at Paramount Studios, where he was busy shooting another "Star Trek" episode.
Stewart said he had been invited to bring his Dickens show to Salt Lake City and accepted after hearing he'd be performing in a beautiful theater, very suitable for the critically acclaimed one-man production (Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah campus).
The actor was particularly excited about his Utah stop because it's coming during the Thanksgiving holidays, allowing him a rare couple of extra days free for some rest and relaxation in the mountains.
"I have been to Utah once before when I visited the Zion National Park area for two days two years ago. At this moment, it's the most beautiful place (I've seen) in the United States and I'm looking forward to my days in the mountains near Salt Lake City," he said.
Stewart hadn't even read "A Christmas Carol" until just a few years ago, when he was involved in a film production in the small British village of Derbyshire.
"I was sitting in the hotel lounge and, having read all of the newspapers, I discovered a slim volume of `A Christmas Carol' on the bookshelf and I realized that I had never really read it.
"I opened up the book and, some three hours later, closed it - having read the whole story," he said in his crisply clipped British accent. "I found myself very moved and very affected.
"It was not at all what I had thought it was. I had first thought it would be a syrupy Victorian fairy tale with a number of rather exotic characters in it and very lightweight, but I discovered that Dickens had written a very powerful, passionate story about redemption and happiness and cruelty.
"I was so moved by it that I began working on ways to dramatize it," he said.
"It's a great story," he added, "because I have not only a dramatization, I have direct access to everything Dickens has ever written about the story. I think that what makes my production different is that it is as authentic as it is possible to be. There's more of Dickens in it. We hear Dickens' voice.
"Not only was Dickens the second greatest British writer after William Shakespeare, he was also an outstandingly skilled actor. The leading professional actors of the day admired him. He ran his own company of amateurs who gave performances in London and all over the country, but he's most well known for his solo readings of his own works."
Stewart noted that the various reading versions of Dickens' works are available. Through researching these, we can determine how the writer's performances of "A Christmas Carol" changed over the years.
Dickens himself was responsible for first diluting the emotional and social power of `A Christmas Carol'," said Stewart, explaining that Dickens turned his story into merely a rather pleasant introduction, followed by some rather grim excerpts from "Oliver Twist."
Stewart noted that there are numerous reportings of women in Charles Dickens' audiences fainting during his description of Nancy in "Oliver Twist," because the writer/actor was so graphic and persuasive.
"In that sense, the tradition of what I'm doing (re-enacting the author reading his own work) goes back to the original creator," Stewart said.
After that initial reading of the book in Derbyshire, Stewart developed his one-man presentation, first performing it as a simple reading for his local parish church in Great Britain for an organ restoration fund.
Since then, he's gone on to present "A Christmas Carol" as a holiday theatrical treat in auditoriums throughout the Los Angeles area and elsewhere, drawing rave reviews from such important critics as Dan Sullivan and Sylvie Drake, both of the Los Angeles Times.
Stewart developed his craft as an actor with the renowned Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in many leading roles, including Oberon in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Touchstone in "As You Like It," Leontes in "The Winter's Tale," Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" as well as the title roles of "Titus Andronicus," "Henry IV" and "Henry V."
"I've seen all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, but I've only performed in 21 of them," Stewart said. Some day - when he has the time - he would like to play Macbeth and Richard III and King Lear or Claudius in "Hamlet" (the latter a role he's performed on television, but never on stage).
He noted that "Star Trek": The Next Generation" keeps him busy 10 months of the year. (The syndicated show is seen locally on a first-run basis on Sundays at 5 p.m., with repeats the following Saturday at 6 p.m. and daily reruns of older segments Mondays through Fridays at 9 p.m., Saturdays at 10 p.m. and Sundays at 10 a.m., all on KSTU, Ch. 13.)
Stewart has one year left on his contract with the show and he's now in the process of forming his own Shakspearean company in the Los Angeles area.
While television has "been the major part of my working year for the past five years ... I've found that I'm suffering from withdrawal symptoms regarding live theater. During 30 years as a stage actor, I was accustomed to doing a variety of work," he said, "so I've begun to create performances (such as the Dickens piece) for myself and others that I can rehearse and perform on weekends.
"I feel that future generations will judge us by the quality of our culture. It is a great testament to our time that more and more people are going to theater, but there's not a great testament for the funding," he said. "Too many people take the short-term view of funding of the arts for our society and forget that it is an absolutely fundamental aspect of our culture."
Even though he's involved in one of the most popular shows on television, he said "I cannot remeber the last time I switched the TV set on."
He said he was "a child of the radio" (and we could hear the radio playing in the background during our telephone conversation). He was ecstatic to discover that Los Angeles has two classical music stations - and was similarly pleased when we informed him that Salt Lake, too, has a couple of classics-oriented stations and that KBYU also features frequent news reports from the BBC (British Broadcasting Company).
(Stewart noted that when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was under house arrest during the recent upheaval in the Soviet Union, he was able to keep abreast of current events by picking up BBC broadcasts on a makeshift wireless radio.)
It's not surprising that many of Stewart's performances of "A Christmas Carol" are in college and university auditoriums. He's lectured on several campuses, in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom, and is an associate director of the Alliance for Creative Theatre, Education and Research (ACTER) at the University of California/Santa Barbara.
His academic work there includes spearheading a project to create short videos focusing on specific Shakespearean characters - 20-minute tapes that teachers can use in the classroom. So far, only three of them are finished (Rosalind in "As You Like It," Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" and Claudius in "Hamlet") and there are plans to make many more. Stewart feels the videos, which are now on the market, will be an invaluable resource for high school and college teachers.
Meanwhile, he's busy readying his annual Dickens production.
When "A Christmas Carol" opens on Broadway later in December, it won't be Stewart's first appearance on the fabled Great White Way.
He was on Broadway 21 years ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company's legendary Peter Brooks production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which played for about five months.
"I have been, so many times, on the brink of returning to Broadway, with either the National Theatre or Royal Shakespeare companies," he said, "but each time something collapsed for a variety of reasons so I'm thrilled to be going back doing my own show."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
`Dickens' is almost sold out
Patrick Stewart's one-man production of "A Christmas Carol" is scheduled Saturday, Nov. 30, at 8 p.m. at Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah campus. It's being presented under the auspices of the Associated Students of the University of Utah. Tickets, which are nearly gone, are priced at $16 and $18. What few remain are available at the Kingsbury Hall box office or all Smith's Tix outlets. Call 467-5996 or 581-7100 for reservations.