About five years ago, Utah native Doug Baker made a kind of lateral job change - from the pomp and ceremony of the Elizabethan "Royal Feaste" at the Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City to the mythical world of Camelot in "King Arthur's Tournament" at the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas.
While one is Tudor and the other is medieval, there are several similarities. The meals for both are served without utensils ("finger foods" back then were more than just chips and dips), the main course at both events is roasted game hen, both productions are theatrical in structure, and they're both in the same general price range ($27 for the seven-course feaste in Cedar City and three dollars more in Las Vegas . . . for a three-course dinner).There are some big differences, too.
At the Excalibur, the Fantasy Faire level showroom seats nearly 1,000 and the production features traditional jousting by knights astride live horses, whereas the Cedar City feaste can handle about 275 patrons and is held in the lavishly decorated middle school gymnasium directly north of the festival's Southern Utah University campus site.
Seating for the Excalibur production is around a long, U-shaped arena, with tiers of tables arranged beneath colorful banners, each of which represents different knights from throughout the realm.
Baker, who developed the script for the Las Vegas production, portrays Merlin the Magician, is first heard making some authoritative preshow announcements. When he issued the edict that smoking would not be permitted within the arena, there was a decidely unbalanced mix of loud, supportive applause and a few boos.
When Merlin appears at the start of the show, it's in a puff of billowing fog and dazzling lasers. The show itself has an ample amount of special effects.
In the USF Feaste, the proceedings are more traditional, with the seven courses ("removes") grandly announced by Lady Katherine and Earl Roderick (Enid Atkinson of Salt Lake City and Davio Dakotablu).
Baker, a native of Roy, Utah, taught in the theater department at Southern Utah State College for eight years and was involved with the original Royal Feaste for five years before leaving Cedar City in 1990.
"It was hard to leave. I really, really liked it," said Baker during a recent interview in the performers' "green room" at the Excalibur Hotel.
He came to Cedar City from the renowned Asolo State Theatre in Florida. Baker had sent resumes out to several schools after deciding that, with a young and growing family, he needed to find work that would allow him to stay closer to home instead of acting all the time.
"I friend of mine said, `I know a wonderful school, but it's out in the middle of nowhere,' and I said `Where?' - expecting her to say Missouri or somewhere like that and she said, `Well, have you ever been to Utah?'
"I said I had been born and raised in Utah and she said, `Oh, really? Have you ever been to Cedar City?' and I said, `This is where the job is - in Cedar City?'"
Baker wasn't quite sure about moving. But the Utah Shakespearean Festival had quite a reputation and he ended up leaving Florida and moving to Cedar City.
Five years after he moved again - from Cedar to Las Vegas - Baker notes that "maybe four days a week I regret leaving, but I think you have to move on. I think security to an actor is the freedom to go, not staying in one place. It's just the opposite of what most people think. We (actors) need the freedom to experience everything in life and they need the security of knowing there's always going to be this regular paycheck."
When Baker first began working with the Royal Feaste it was not operated by the festival. Instead, it was a function of SUSC's Division of Continuing Education. It was later taken over by the festival and the year that Baker left, SUSC was in the process of making the transition to Southern Utah University.
He wrote, directed and performed in the Royal Feaste at Cedar City from 1985 to 1989. He continues to maintain close ties to both the school and the festival.
"Earlier this year I participated in a silent auction for a fund-raiser by donating my services to host a private party anywhere in the West, including airfare and hotel, but it ended up that the person who successfully bid on this lives only half a mile from me right here in Vegas, so that's actually quite convenient," Baker said.
He also arranged an autographed photograph from the Excalibur Hotel and some tickets to the King Arthur's Tournament for the auction.
Baker has been involved with the Excalibur production since both the hotel and the show first opened five years ago.
A friend of his in Las Vegas had seen Baker at the festival contacted the producers - Peter and Patrick Jackson, a father-and-son team - and told them they should audition him. At that time, the producers were intent on hiring a real actor - i.e. someone from New York or Los Angeles (certainly not Utah).
"That really made me mad, so I was determined to get an audition. I wrote every week and called twice a week. I wasn't even that interested in the job - I just thought it would be good for me to audition.
"They finally said, `Fine, come down and we'll see you so we can get you to shut up.' And I was very prepared. I came with a character piece, a physical piece, a big vocal piece and I was ready to make some adjustments. I knew just what to show them because of my work at the festival.
"At that time, the King Arthur's Tournament concept was still being developed. They had decided on the characters and I thought they had a script, but they didn't."
Two days later Baker learned that the producers had decided to hire him on the spot.
How he got word of it is practically another story in itself.
Baker and another SUSC faculty member had taken a group of about 60 students and youths to Salt Lake City to produce a big fund-raising Elizabethan Feaste at the Salt Palace. When Baker went back to his hotel, his two boys had fallen asleep watching TV - and locked him out of his room. After taking the door off the hinges (and attracting quite a crowd of onlookers in the process), he noticed that there was a message light flashing on his phone - his wife, Kay, calling to say he had the Las Vegas job.
Still not sure if he really wanted the job or not, he decided to talk it over with the other faculty adviser - and was, once again, locked out of his room. This time (rather sheepishly) he had to go down to the front desk in his pajamas.
"Do we have to take the door off the hinges again?" they asked.
No, they didn't. Instead, they got him back into the room and made him promise not to leave again that night.
Meanwhile, SUSC wouldn't give him one year's leave of absence, so he bit the bullet and quit there to take the new job at the Excalibur.
"In a way, that worked out OK, too. I probably would have gone back to SUSC after the first six months because this show was killing me. It was two shows a night, six nights a week and I weighted 30 pounds more than I do now. It was just hell on wheels!"
For the first eight months, Baker didn't even have an understudy.
Today, the show is performed seven nights a week (still two shows each day), but he has a "swing" performer who fills in.
"Fortunately, this job has kept me fairly healthy. It's impossible to do when you don't feel well," he said, explaining that he keeps up a fairly strict routine in order to keep in shape.
Even though Merlin the Magician doesn't actually participate in the jousting tournaments, the show is very physical. Baker is constantly running back and forth the full lenth of the arena, working the audience and keeping up the show's momentum.
"I don't eat meat after 2 p.m., only carbs and fruits. I have to eat between shows. If i didn't there's no way I could perform - and it can only be fruits or carbs again and it can't be very much. I drink only juices or water. No sodas and very few dairy products because the vocals are very difficult.
"I have to have a strong physical warmup. I usually warm up at home before I come in and then do a stretch workout and somewhat of a dancer's workout because there's some fencing skills in the show."
Baker developed the script for the show. Originally, there was just a scenario (and whoever wrote that probably gets credit for writing it), but, according to Baker, "the producer would say, `Well, we need something here' and I said I'd write it and the next thing I knew I was going home from rehearsals everyday and writing like a crazy person. It was a nightmare, but it was also kind of fun and we came up with some wonderful things."
The show has continued to evolve, not a lot, but in subtle ways.
At the opening of the production, a young man comes riding into the arena alone on a white horse - then is thrown off the horse and dreams of Camelot.
One of Baker's four sons, 14-year-old Colby, plays The Boy three to four nights a week.
"He is a wonderful rider, he truly is. He seats a horse very well for a boy his age. It's nepotism, of course, but we've had him in training for two years with a really wonderful rider and Colby deserves every bit to be in the show because he has learned that skill," Baker said.
Doug and Kay Baker's other three sons are Chad, Kellan and Max.
Chad, 15, is currently in the throes of learning how to drive. "I tell you, that's patience personified," said Baker.
Both Chad and Colby attend the High School of Performing Arts.
Kellan will be 10 this year and Max just turned 8.
"I associate my children's birthdates with shows I've been in," said Baker. "Kellan was born on audition day for `Our Town' during the school year in Cedar City and Max was born during the third week of rehearsals for the Greenshow in 1987. Colby was born when I was playing all three of the boyfriends in `Sweet Charity' and Chad was born two weeks after the season had ended at the Asolo State Theatre, where I had just played Edmund in `Long Day's Journey Into Night.'"
Baker's wife, Kay, is from the Granger/West Valley City area. They met while studying at Utah State University.
Baker attended Weber State College for awhile, then transferred to USU, where he got involved with the Old Lyric Repertory Company and got hooked on theater.
While the King Arthur's Tournament keeps him very busy, he does have time now and then to tackle other roles - such as a recent performance as Harold Hill in the Community College of Southern Nevada's production of "The Music Man" (in which Kellan portrayed Winthrop, the shy lad with the lisp), and he does quite a bit of work with a Las Vegas performers' group called Golden Rainbow, which raises and provides funds for people with AIDS.
"We only raise money earmarked for housing and related amenities like electricity and telephone service . . . `dignity money' actually. We raised about $100,000 statewide last year and we own two fourplexes."
Baker's "swing," who fills in for Baker at least one night a week, is Las Vegas native Phil Schelburn, who was an acting student at SUSC during the 1980s (he was a national forensics champ), and who now performs and directs in Las Vegas.
Baker does enjoy playing Merlin. It's an impish kind of role and he can get away with some mischief during the show that the knights or King Arthur and his court can't.
Every night Baker picks one older woman in the audience to zero in on and he asks her to blow him a kiss.
"That kind of personalizes the show and brings everyone in the audience just a little closer together. If the woman I've picked out (by scanning the crowd) doesn't blow me the kiss, Merlin actually scrambles over the wall and into the audience to get it. I don't give up because if I do, then I've lost the audience."
Like the Royal Feaste in Cedar City, King Arthur's Tournament breaks down the barriers that usually exist between an audience and a stage filled with actors. Both shows integrate some audience participation into the shows. For the Las Vegas production, a couple of other performers come out at the very first and drill the crowd into yelling "Huzzah!" in order to cheer for their favorite knight during the jousting competition.
A couple of kids who work upstairs have also worked at the Festival and they were quite concerned when Baker mentioned that he was going to teach the audience how to "Huzzah." They insisted that it belonged to the Festival, but Baker explained that it's used a lot of places and it's a pretty universal phrase.