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I’ve Been Cast in the First New York Revival of Richard Greenberg’s “The Violet Hour”!

Andrew Sellon — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:52:40 +0000

I’m very excited. This has been a very good week. I landed a neat role in a short animated film, and now I’ve been cast in the plum role of Gidger in the first New York revival of Richard Greenberg’s fascinating play, The Violet Hour! It’s being produced by the Active Theater here in NYC this March. I play a publisher’s assistant, an extremely well-educated man who is having a midlife crisis of epic proportions. He is emotionally on the edge, terrified he will live and die without making his mark on the world. Gidger is outspoken, sometimes shockingly so, and also extremely funny. He’s one of those people who holds nothing back, and has an impressive vocabulary with which to express his intense emotions. The play is slightly fantastical, and full of surprises–including a printing machine that outputs potentially life-changing information!

I had a great time at the auditions held by casting director Cindi Rush and Artistic Director/Director Nathaniel Shaw. My thanks to them both for creating such a great audition atmosphere, and for inviting me to audition in the first place. And of course my thanks to my agent, Reneé Glicker at About Artists, for submitting me. I learned after the auditions that Nathaniel has an impressive resumé, including three years as a featured dancer with the magnificent Paul Taylor Dance Company. PTDC happens to be my favorite dance company in the world, so I took this as a great bit of serendipity. I know how hard the PTDC dancers work, and the remarkable quality of their performances. One of the best directors I’ve worked with to date, Sara Lampert Hoover, was also a modern dancer. Nathaniel was gracious, insightful, and a lot of fun at the auditions, so I can’t wait to start rehearsals on February 13th!

The Active Theater’s production of The Violet Hour will play March 9-25 in NYC. I will post more information as soon as I have it. You can also click the logo on this post to visit their web site and see a full calendar of performance dates. If you’re going to be in NYC, I hope you’ll come to one of our performances and say hello afterwards. This is a very funny and thought-provoking play that deserves a big audience. And in fact, the March 9th performance is already sold out! Stay tuned for more information.

The Reviews and Photos are in for The 39 Steps!

Andrew Sellon — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:34:33 +0000

With the onset of the holidays, I’ve finally found time to sit down and add the reviews and a nifty photo gallery from my recent production of The 39 Steps at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Jupiter, Florida. I had a fantastic time there onstage and off, and am only sorry it was over so soon. Many people have asked to see photos of the production, since they couldn’t make it down to Florida to see us in person. I’m glad I can finally oblige! But honestly, as delightful as the pictures are, they can’t hope to capture the level of silliness we reached with every performance. I played about 15 or so characters, and had 20 costume changes–6 of them in the last 5 minutes of the show! It was like doing the Actor Olympics–and it was great, giddy fun.

I found a great WordPress plugin that made it easy for me to set up a swell-looking photo showcase, complete with a carousel of thumbnail images for all the pictures, so you can just sit back and watch the slideshow, or you can click any thumbnail in the carousel to jump to that image from the production.

I don’t yet know what 2012 will bring, but I hope it brings more projects like this production, working with wonderful people like all the folks at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, inspired (and hilarious) director Peter Amster, and my fellow cast members Joe Foust, Christian Pedersen, and Beth Hylton. It was a great experience, start to finish.

You can click the image in this post to view the photos and the reviews. If you happened to receive an iPad this holiday season, the photo slideshow is supposed to display nicely on those devices; it works well on my iPhone.

Happy New Year!

Looking Back at 2011

Andrew Sellon — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:33:01 +0000

I can certainly say that 2011 wasn’t dull. For one thing, The Smurfs movie came out. And even though only a few seconds of my one scene made it into the final cut of the film, that fleeting onscreen appearance was enough to make our 10-year-old nephew Nicholas very excited. Watching the film in 3D with Tim, Nicholas, and other family members was one of the highlights of the year for me. You can see a picture of us at the movie theatre in a prior post.

I also had the opportunity to perform in two productions this year that probably couldn’t have been more different from each other. I was hired to play Pastor Manders in an updated version of Ibsen’s classic melodrama, Ghosts, as the inaugural production of the Classic Play Series theatre company. Roles like that are one of the reasons I love acting. Pastor Manders represents many things that I personally abhor. He allows his devotion to rigid rules and social conventions to blind him to simple human truths and needs. And yet under pressure, in the end he is willing to compromise his high morals just to save his own skin. At first glance, not a very sympathetic character. I’ve only seen one production of the play, back in Boston when I was in high school. I remember feeling that Manders came across as too much of a villainous straw man serving Ibsen’s social commentary to be very convincing as a living, breathing person. I couldn’t see why Mrs. Alving would listen to him for a minute!

: With Antoinette LaVecchia in Ibsen’s “Ghosts”

So I thought it would be quite a challenge to create a believable Paster Manders who lives and thrives in 2011 while still honoring the character’s purpose in the script. And on revisiting Ibsen’s play, I found so much that simply didn’t come out in the production I saw–so much love for Mrs. Alving, in particular! It’s the relationship he secretly still wants but cannot ever acknowledge or consummate. I think Ibsen meant it as a true, deep love–the best part of Manders. That delicate balance was beautifully preserved in the modern adaptation of the script we used. As we worked, I found an enormous amount of love and good will in Manders, and director Emmy Frank enthusiastically encouraged me to go with this more textured approach. I used that to inhabit him and embrace his goals for the duration of the story. The result was very satisfying. His attempts to do the right thing were still spectacularly misguided, he still made the same horrible choices, and he still ruined people’s lives by not following his heart. But I feel like I made him more credible as someone Mrs. Alving might actually love, admire, and turn to for guidance. It was one of those classic “walk a mile in the other man’s shoes” experiences that makes acting such a rewarding ongoing journey of discovery.

: With 39 Steps cast members Joe Foust, Christian Pedersen, and Beth Hylton

And then later in 2011 I had the joy of being cast as one of the two multi-role Clowns in The 39 Steps for the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Jupiter, Florida. The first day, Artistic Director Andrew Kato introduced the entire staff and said they were all there to help us–and he meant it. And the story onstage was even better. We laughed ourselves silly through the all-too-brief rehearsal period, and prided ourselves on getting through the run with no broken bones, despite the high-speed antics during every performance. It may rank as the most physically exhausting show I’ve done so far in my career, but it sure was a blast. And come on–what actor could wouldn’t jump at the chance to play a mix of characters including a naughty Cockney milkman, a sex-starved Scotswoman, and a ruthless (and of course totally bonkers) Nazi villain. At last, someone let me play the bad guy! Thank you, Peter Amster and Andrew Kato, for a terrific experience. You can see a gallery of great photos and read the reviews by clicking the image, or by clicking here.

The year wasn’t all theatre magic, of course. My dear friend, the very fine actor Donald Grody, finally lost his long battle with prostate cancer. We had done two productions of King Lear together and I hoped to do other shows with him as well. And he was a good friend and true mentor offstage. I’m so grateful to have had him in my life for the last few years. If you want to know more about Donald, I wrote a post about him earlier this year. Donald was not a man to brag, but every professional actor out there owes him a deep debt of gratitude for all he accomplished when he was Executive Director of Actors Equity; it’s a remarkable list of very important achievements that continue to benefit union actors to this day. And November marked a year since my father’s passing. Some years ago, I wrote a lyric that in one verse anticipated losing him eventually, and says simply “I still think of him every day.” Sure enough, I do. And his passing makes me think of my late mother a lot more, too. Grace to them both.

And then there were all the shows Tim and I went to see! Gosh, too many to list at this point. We very much enjoyed The Book of Mormon–and I was amused to discover that it’s basically a very traditional, almost retro book musical that happens to have a potty mouth. We also quite liked the revival of Follies. And the list goes on and on. But perhaps the one production that stands out most in my mind is Sleep No More–the immersive, subversive gothic dance/theatre event loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with a bit of Hitchcock’s Rebecca thrown in for good measure. I had never gone to an immersive theatre piece for the same reason I generally avoid stand-up comics: fear that the material just won’t work. Well, Sleep No More works like gangbusters. I went with my old hometown friend Liz Law, and when we compared notes breathlessly at the end of the three hours, we found we’d seen almost entirely different events! The cast is almost silent, but speaks eloquently through the sometimes alluring, sometimes bruising, always compelling choreography. The set decor is enormously decadent and spooky, and there’s five floors of it to explore. There is nudity, violence, blood, smoke, strobe light, and a lot of spooky film noir-ish music. It’s definitely an evening about sex and death. And then some. And definitely not for anyone under 18. I went a second time and had the pleasure of seeing some scenes again with the other cast (they are equally wonderful), and exploring some new characters and scenes as well–including a couple of one-on-one encounters that were really mind-blowing. In one, I found myself locked into a hut having tea with an ominous, fortune-telling nurse. In another, I was pulled into a silent scene with a “drunken” charactor who wanted my help–and I had to figure out what he needed quickly and without words. The whole sequence lasted probably about 5 minutes, overseen by a silent group of other masked visitors like myself, so it was simultaneously public and suprisingly intimate. It was magical. The first time I went, I was strictly one of the many silent observers; I was definitely rewarded for taking more chances the second time around. I fully intend to see SNM at least once more. If you go, follow these tips: 1) Dress very comfortably, and wear sneakers, 2) Don’t bring any bags/purses unless you’re prepared to pay to check them, 3) Be prepared to run (sometimes very fast) up and down warehouse stairwells and dark hallways in pursuit of characters whose lives capture your interest, and 4) If an impulse to explore grabs you–follow it! As the elevator operator announces before sending everyone out into the dimly-lit playing area: Fortune favors the bold. You can read more and buy tickets by clicking the image or by clicking here.

So, I don’t know what’s in store for 2012 yet, but I certainly have my to-do list of roles I want to play (and some I’d love to revisit). Tim and I are drawing up a list of places we want to go; I loved my first trip (ever) to San Francisco this year, especially as it was for our niece Rachel’s wedding in May. Then we had our niece Kerry’s wedding in October, and shortly after that, our nephew Matt announced his engagement. And of course, same-sex marriage was FINALLY approved in New York State in 2011, so Tim and I are looking into getting married in 2012–after more than 18 years together. I’m gearing up to make the new year full of exciting new adventures onstage and off. I don’t know about you, but I plan to be bold!

Happy New Year.

Great Trailer For The 39 Steps at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Andrew Sellon — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:24:51 +0000

I know, I know; the show has already closed! But I found that the rehearsals and run were so intense that I didn’t have the time or energy to add as many blog posts as I would have liked. So, I’m adding them now as time allows!

Here’s a genuinely clever trailer that the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s inventive marketing department created to advertise the show. It only shows a couple of the characters we each played, but it does give you a great feel for the general tone of silliness that we sustained for 8 shows a week. It features all four of us performers: me, Christian Pedersen, Beth Hylton, and Joe Foust. Enjoy!

The 39 Steps Opens Tonight!

Andrew Sellon — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:27:39 +0000

It’s all happening so fast! Here we are at opening night already. We’ll do a few last-minute tweaks this afternoon, then the performance, and after that a grand party at a local restaurant. Our preview audiences have been wonderful, and we can’t wait to be officially up and running! It’s too bad the run is only two weeks, but we’ll enjoy every minute of it. I play a dozen different roles, and one of my favorites is the chatty and excitable Mrs. McGarrigle, proprietress of the McGarrigle Hotel in the Scottish Highlands. Here I am as Mrs. M, with Joe Foust as Mr. McGarrigle, welcoming Beth Hylton (Pamela) and Christian Pedersen (Richard Hannay, our hero) on a dark and stormy night.

My thanks again to director Peter Amster and Artistic Director Andrew Kato for a fantastic experience, and to all the designers for such a beautiful-looking show. I just wish they could all stay and hang out with us for the whole run! But we’ll have a great time doing our zany little play with the fabulous staff of the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. This show is like being a cog in a giant Swiss clock–the “show” backstage is almost as complicated and wacky as the one onstage! Break a leg, all! Off to opening night!!

The 39 Steps Opens Thursday November 3rd

Andrew Sellon — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 01:14:20 +0000

Wow, this rehearsal period has flown by! It feels like I just stepped off the plane in sunny Florida the other day, and yet last night we gave our first preview performance of The 39 Steps. It went very well indeed, and we’re looking forward to putting the show in front of more audiences this week and next. After all this intensive work, it seems a shame that we’re only running for two weeks–but it’s great that the run is already 86% sold!

Artistic Director Andrew Kato set the perfect tone on the first day of rehearsal, by having everyone in the building join the cast and production staff for a meet and greet session. His message was simple: everyone in the building is there to help us present the best production possible. The staff members with whom I’ve interacted have certainly gone out of their way to be helpful. The theatre’s guild even provided us with welcome beach bags full of useful goodies, and cooked us a wonderful dinner during tech weekend. In short, it’s a pretty great place to work.

The rehearsals themselves have been fantastic–director Peter Amster created just the kind of democratic, respectful, playful, let’s-see-what-we-discover environment that I love. And this despite the fact that he’s directed the show many times before. He freely admitted that while he knows what has worked in past productions, he knows that the play inevitably has a different “fit” when worn by a different set of actors. So while we benefited from his extensive expertise with this demanding script, we also were given carte blanche to get out there and surprise him. We laughed a LOT. Christian Pedersen (pictured here with me in front of the theatre’s marquee) plays our hero, Richard Hannay. Beth Hylton (a fellow grad of UNC-Chapel Hill’s MFA Acting program, and also represented by my agent, Renée Glicker of About Artists) plays the three women he encounters, and Joe Foust and I play the two Clowns who become all the other characters. Joe is the only one who has done this script before, as he was in a prior production for Peter. I think all four of us in the cast feel especially good that despite Peter’s vast experience with the script, we’ve still managed to come up with new interpretations and storytelling details that he hasn’t seen before. And in turn, Peter has come up with a lot of great new ideas to enhance this production–including a hilarious final image that involves one particularly silly final costume change for me. I’ll have to get a picture of that one to share!

We’ve also been blessed with the incredible staff at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, including enthusiastic Associate Producer/Company Manager, Rachel Blavatnik, our unflappable Production Stage Manager, Brandy DeMil, and her resourceful Assistant Stage Manager, T. Scott Wooten. The design team has done a wonderful job of making the production look gorgeous. I plan to do a separate post to talk a little bit about the production design, hopefully with some photos!

If you’re going to be in the Jupiter, Florida area, I encourage you to come down and see this charming and very silly show. The cast is wonderful, the script is a hoot, and you don’t need to know the films of Alfred Hitchcock to have a great time.

A Lear Review on Free Shakespeare Site

Andrew Sellon — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 17:53:55 +0000

I just came across a very interesting site called playshakespeare.com, which is a free resource offering online texts of all of William Shakespeare’s plays, as well as reviews of theatrical productions, an online community, research materials, the inevitable Bard-related shopping, and more. It’s an ambitious site, so it’s going to take me a while to look through it, but I certainly suggest you check it out for yourself (unless you’ve already beaten me to it, which is entirely possible!).

To my surprise, I found a review of the 2009 NY Classical Theatre production of King Lear that we performed in Central Park and Battery Park. The reviewer, Roseanne Wells, has lovely things to say about my dear friend Donald Grody as the tragic king, and she also gives a beautiful summation of the Fool and what I was doing with the role:

“Acting as a nursemaid and scolding schoolteacher, the Fool (Andrew Sellon) doles out tonics to calm Lear while chastising him through humor and logic, the only way to avoid offending him. Sellon also infuses genuine concern for Lear, worrying about his physical and mental health, desperate to keep him from harm; he is a fool by trade, a caregiver by loyalty and love.”

I think that puts it beautifully. To my knowledge, this is the only actual review of that production. You can read the full review by clicking here. If you ever come across another one somewhere, please send me the link!

You can visit PlayShakespeare.com by clicking the image on this post. I noticed that they also have a link to an iPhone app; there’s a $9.99 “Pro” version and a free version. I’ve downloaded the free one to start with, and will do another post if the app is really neat.

Come See Me in The 39 Steps at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Florida This November!

Andrew Sellon — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:27:15 +0000

Okay. I’m super excited. First The Smurfs and now this! My agent Renée and her associate Joe called from About Artists this afternoon to tell me I’ve landed one of the two Clown roles in the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s upcoming production of the hit Hitchcock spy spoof, The 39 Steps! I’ve been dying to do this show since I saw the NY production (which coincidentally included acting buddy Arnie Burton in a brilliant turn as one of the Clowns). I love playing multiple characters, and I’ll be playing plenty of ‘em in this show. I also love Florida! So this all works out nicely.

My thanks to Director Peter Amster, Artistic Director Andrew Kato, Casting Director Bob Cline, and the two wonderful readers who were there both for Monday’s initial audition and Tuesday’s callbacks. My thanks also to Renée and Joe for ongoing enthusiasm and support. Given how much fun I had at the auditions, I can’t wait to start rehearsals. My partner Tim is already looking at the calendar to plan some Florida time with me. It turns out Renée also represents one of the other performers who was selected, which means she represents half of the four-person cast!

The show starts rehearsals on October 11th, and runs from November 1-13 (closing on my birthday, which is kind of cool). For more information about the production, click the image on this post to visit the theatre’s web site. I hope I’ll see some of you there! I’ll be one of the two guys in the hats. And wigs. And pants. And dresses. And phony moustaches. And funny accents. You get the idea….

Vermont Stage Bids Fond Farewell to Artistic Director Mark Nash

Andrew Sellon — Tue, 17 May 2011 02:37:41 +0000

After a decade of serving the Burlington community with an endlessly varied and ambitious array of theatrical productions, Artistic Director Mark Nash has decided it’s time for him to move on and try something new. Mark has hired me for a number of productions over the last decade, so when he called to invite me back up to Vermont to participate in a one-night-only farewell gala performance in June, Tim and I rearranged a vacation to make sure we can be there. I first worked with Mark when he asked me to participate in Vermont Young Playwrights Festival (his predecessor, Blake Robison, invited me for my first festival, then Mark hired me for 10 more, making a total of 11 consecutive and wonderful years with that great program). In 2002, right after 9/11, Mark hired me to play Vladimir in what turned out to be a fantastic (and sold out) production of Waiting for Godot. Three years later, he invited me back to play Charlie in The Foreigner, which he directed, and which remains one of VSC’s biggest hits. Over the next couple of years, he asked me to participate in two seasons of their holiday offering Winter Tales, which he also directed. Then in 2007 he hired me for I Am My Own Wife, directed by the wonderful Sara Lampert Hoover, and later that year asked me back to play Wayne in the production of Inspecting Carol that he was directing. Most recently, he brought me back to play the Fool in King Lear, VSC’s first full-scale Shakespeare production, and he did a fantastic job yet again directing that challenging show. So a good part of my career over the last decade has taken place in Burlington, Vermont, and I’ve grown an enormous amount as an actor in an environment that always felt welcoming and full of positive creative energy. Mark Nash is the man who made it all possible.

I’m sorry to hear that Mark is leaving VSC, but I’m sure wherever he lands, whether it’s in the theatre or another line of work altogether, he will do creative and wonderful things. I count myself a very lucky person, and an extremely lucky actor, that Mark Nash came into my life. And I’m deeply honored that VSC is bringing me up to Burlington to help pay tribute to him. Hail, and Farewell, old friend! I will have more to say about Mark’s work at VSC in another blog post after the June performance.

February 2010

Andrew Sellon — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:16:05 +0000

I had a number of good auditions this month, and a number of callbacks from those. No bookings, but great feedback, and so I press on! I also did more Lewis Carroll-related interviews in anticipation of the March release of the Tim Burton “Alice” film sequel. Interviews included a recorded interview for NPR, and a phone interview Charlene Gianetti for her excellent site, womanaroundtown.com. You can read the resulting article, in which I’m heavily quoted, here. I also did an interview for a Polish publication that I was assured was a cross between Time and New Yorker magazine. I’ll look forward to reading a translation of that article.