Actor Randy Moore is many people to many audiences.
Theatergoers in Dallas, where Moore is arguably the most familiar local stage figure, know him as Ebenezer Scrooge, Cyrano de Bergerac, Sir Thomas More and Sherlock Holmes.Movie and television viewers have seen him as a restaurant maitre 'd accommodating newly rich Brian Bosnall in "Blank Check," a tour guide hustling Gene Hackman and Gayle Hunnicutt onto a plane in "Target," a Union general in "Heaven and Hell."
To TV viewers in Chicago, he is a desperate customer in a commercial for the Health Mart drugstore chain.
And to audiences in Fort Worth, Randy Moore is the ghost of John Barrymore in the comedy "I Hate Hamlet," which runs through this weekend.
Rarely have performer and character been so superbly matched. Moore, making his Fort Worth debut, played the same role two years ago when the Dallas Theater Center staged "I Hate Hamlet," a 1991 comedy in which the ghost of legendary thespian Barrymore, widely regarded as one of the finest Hamlets in history, coaches a nervous young TV actor for his first portrayal of Shakespeare's most famous character.
Playwright Paul Rudnick (screen writer for "Addams Family Values" and "Sister Act II") has the young actor, Andrew Rally, renting the Manhattan apartment where John Barrymore lived during his record-breaking 1922 Broadway run in "Hamlet." This "actor, legend, seducer, corpse" winds up counseling Andrew on personal matters unrelated to the acting profession.
Moore put his brand so firmly on the character that Casa Manana, the Fort Worth theater staging the play, didn't bother to hold auditions for the role.
"We knew from the beginning that we wanted Randy," said Casa's executive producer, Van Kaplan.
Moore's association with the Great John B. goes back even further. In 1978, the Dallas Theater Center staged "The Royal Family," with Moore as Tony Cavendish, a womanizing matinee idol patterned after Barrymore.
Moore spent three decades as a member of the Dallas Theater Center's resident company. He still acts there regularly, although the permanent ensemble has been dissolved. That experience affected Moore's career in significant ways. It made him a team player, and it enabled him to earn a living at his craft in an era when the "day job" was the norm for professional actors who chose to live in Texas rather than New York or Los Angeles.
"I was first able to make a living and buy a home because I was in a resident company," Moore said. "That was the basis of my income. When I started to do commercials and film on top of that base, that made possible the vacations and I guess you would say the luxuries."
Moore's ability to stay employed is enhanced because he's known in the acting community as both a leading and a supporting player.
"That comes from having been in a resident company all those years," he said. "That's what I aspired to be, a company actor. I don't feel the need to be the leading actor all the time. Often the little roles are a lot of fun. And if you're going to be in a company that's doing several plays in a season, it's detrimental to be the lead in all the shows. Audiences can grow tired of you."
The Dallas Theater Center's decision two years ago to discontinue using a year-round ensemble altered the career game plan for Moore and others.
"I have had to get out in the market like I hadn't done before," he said. "At my age, I'm having to explore and do things that most actors do in their 20s: setting up networks, going to auditions. It's not that I worked exclusively in Dallas; I always worked other places. But I'm doing a lot more of that now."
The phrase "at my age" seems incongruous. Moore is probably 50ish. Yet for a good two decades, he has seemed frozen at 35. That was his mid-range of portrayals when he was in his 20s, and it hasn't appeared to advance appreciably, except for the occasional geezer role, most notably the elderly Col. Kincaid in Preston Jones' "Texas Trilogy."
"I've been playing old men since I was 16," Moore said with a wry grin. "It takes less makeup now. It's funny. I've never been hesitant about telling my age, but I'm now finding for the first time that I do have to be quiet about it. People now go `Ohhh,' and start to see me in older roles rather than younger ones that I can still play.
"I don't look 30 any more, or 35, but I can still pass for 40, which is where a lot of meaty roles are. It's peculiar. I don't like it, because I don't like being evasive. In British theater, you'll see men and women considerably older than the characters they're playing. But we don't do that as much here."
Moore has taken his acting on the road in various directions: the Huntington Hartford Theatre in Los Angeles; the Houston, Colorado and Utah Shakespeare festivals; and, most recently, to Center Stage in Baltimore.
"It's a different experience," he said. "In a resident company, the actors spend a whole lot of time together, like a family. When you go out and do one play at a time and try to bond with the cast, you realize that you're not together very much. I had a wonderful time in Baltimore, where the director gave a lot of rehearsal time for the cast to bond . . . literally bond. We were all living in these Baltimore row houses. It was like being in a college dorm. We were able to do a lot of socializing."
Moore's for-real college socializing was at Baylor University in Waco during the early 1960s, when Paul Baker was both drama chairman there and artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center. After graduating, the Houston-born Moore moved up to the DTC, which functioned as a theater graduate school. He soon joined the resident company that Baker formed, teaching as well as acting.
The actor met his wife, Norma Moore, when she was his student. Company member Edward Herrmann, who went on to become a highly visible screen actor, was their Cupid.
"When Norma went to LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), one of her classmates was Ed Herrmann. He came back and said there was a girl coming to Dallas he thought I might like. The next year she was in my class, six weeks later we were dating and a year or so later we were married."
Norma Moore became a Dallas Theater Center company member but curtailed her acting career after the birth of their son, Kyle, now 101/2, who, in his father's words, is "terribly creative and dramatic and singularly uninterested in being on the stage."
Of the 200-plus plays he has done professionally, Jones' "Texas Trilogy," which premiered in 1974 at the Dallas Theater Center, tops Moore's list of favorites, "because I got to originate the role." He had to be talked into it, however, by playwright Jones and director Baker.
"I was 35 at the time, and I didn't know if I should play a 78-year-old character," he said.