Thursday, June 01, 2000
Touring actor home for summer in 'Threepenny Opera'
By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Stage First wraps its second season at the Aronoff's Fifth Third Bank Theater with its first full-fledged musical.
There isn't one that better fits the theater's “world classics” mission than Bertolt Brecht's and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera. It is flavored with the melodic discord of the Berlin cabaret, having been written in the years between two world wars.
Threepenny is as dark as the era's uncertain politics, when it was becoming clear that the Great War was not the last war. Its players are villains, not heroes. There is none more villainous than Peachum, who has made his fortune off the backs of the less fortunate.
Jim Stump will play Peachum, making it back-to-back appearances with Stage First. Last month, he marked his return to Cincinnati after 18 months with a supporting turn in Lysistrata.
His last show in Cincinnati before leaving was Stage First's debut production Under Milkwood in September 1998. He and Stage First artistic director Nicholas Korn stayed in touch.
“I think Stage First has the potential to be the fourth professional theater in town” (behind Playhouse, Ensemble and Cincinnati Shakespeare), Mr. Stump says.
18 months of travel
It seems like Mr. Stump has been performing everywhere but Cincinnati, most steadily with a bus-and-truck tour of Anything Goes fronted by Gloria Loring (Days of Our Lives). The cast is on the bus, the sets and costumes are on the truck.
He's seen the Northeast, the Southeast, Canada, the Southwest and the Far West over the past 18 months. He's been a chorus member, double understudy and “one-quarter of a male quartet” in a series of one-, two- and three-night engagements.
The tour is down until fall, restarting in Logan, Utah, in mid-September and closing in Brooklyn, N.Y. in mid-November. Usually Mr. Stump fills his breaks with work in professional theaters in Illinois and Tennessee performing in shows like Miracle on 34th Street and Singin' in the Rain.
This summer, Mr. Stump is catching his breath back home in Norwood.
This kind of touring can be a grind, acknowledges Mr. Stump, although he loves the Anything Goes company. “I saw the Alamo and Riverwalk in a 90-minute lunch stop in San Antonio. You learn to walk fast and carry your lunch.”
It would be lovely to not just be based in Cincinnati, but to be in Cincinnati, he says. If only there was paid work for an actor.
Things are looking up, he says, “way up from three years ago,” including more educational opportunities for actors.
Actors will take work for a variety of reasons, notes Mr. Stump — “for the play, for a part, for a particular theater or director,” but it's impossible to dismiss the importance of paid work. That, he says, “is what will keep everybody in town — not necessarily all the time, but coming back to town.”
Local theater growing
Mr. Stump, who has pitched himself into theater since his student days at Indian Hill High School, tried to get a local Theatre Information Project off the ground in the mid-'90s. It never caught hold, and then he started touring.
He loves the newly established League of Cincinnati Theatres and has already signed up for the mid-June unified auditions at Playhouse in the Park. The auditions will bring together professional theaters within a 200-mile range with several hundred actors seeking work.
“There are a lot of companies in town I'd like to work with,” Mr. Stump says. He's already been chatting with folks in charge at Dayton's Human Race.
A veteran auditioner, Mr. Stump offers this piece of advice for all the first-timers signed up for the unifieds: Wear a dash of color, and make sure you wear that same color again for a call-back.
“I don't mean dress up in fire engine red from head to foot, but some spot of color makes you recognizable, and recognizable the second time.
“And I always tell people to dress nicely for an audition. I always see people dressed like they don't care. If you don't take it seriously, how are they going to take you seriously?”
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Touring actor home for summer in 'Threepenny Opera'
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